The Case for the Washington Football Team
Washington, D.C. is not the city it was 70 years ago, or even 30 years ago.
Last week, Magic Johnson, one of the new owners holding a minority stake in the Washington Commanders, said that the capital’s football team may well be renamed again in the next few years.
“Everything’s on the table, right? Especially after this year. We’ll see where we are with the name,” Johnson told NBC. “We’re going to spend this year understanding what we have in place. The name of the team will come up eventually.”
The franchise’s majority owner, Josh Harris, has also discussed the potential for a name change. While he said that his top priority for the team is winning—a welcome change from the previous owner—he also indicated that he cares about pleasing the fans. And a name change would be a big part of achieving that goal. Within 24 hours of the NFL’s approval of Harris’s purchase, he received multiple requests from fans begging for him to ditch the Commanders’ name.
Most people, of course, want to revert back to the Redskins. After more than 20 years of controversy, capped by a painful, protracted transition to the new name, the Redskins is still the name by which most Washingtonians call their team. The evidence of its longevity is everywhere: The logo is still plastered on many city playgrounds, as well as the old highway signs indicating the exit for RFK Stadium (whose closure in favor of an all-but inaccessible suburban monstrosity is another sore spot). The Redskins have a powerful pull, not just on the grandpas who wear burgundy and gold polos to church on Sunday, but also on the college kids down the street from my house, who, every weekend in the fall, play beer pong on a table painted to look like the Joe Gibbs–era FedEx Field.
I am sympathetic to these longings, but, when I consider the proposition practically, I don’t see it becoming reality. Washington, D.C. is not the city it was 70 years ago when the team’s founder, George Preston Marshall, successfully marketed the Redskins as the “team of the South,” bringing with him all the baggage that appellation entailed. It’s not even the city it was a little more than 30 years ago, when, under Jack Kent Cooke’s ownership, the Redskins won their last Super Bowl. In that era, the ’Skins still played in RFK, a formidable inner-city stadium with a dirt field, crumbling locker rooms, and grandstands so small that fans practically participated in the games themselves.
There’s no going back to that time. These days, D.C. is a big, professionalized town, populated more or less permanently by transplants uninterested in the locals’ backward old ways. Even if, by some miracle, the new owners did toss the Commanders name and revive the Redskins, I suspect it would be in some ersatz, unsatisfying manner. The diminishment would leave fans wishing they had let the dead bury the dead.
Instead, I propose that Josh Harris et al. do something truly bold. The Redskins aren’t coming back, and the Commanders can’t stay. Barring another pathetic attempt at a rebrand (Would anyone really accept the Pigskins? the Redtails? the Red Hogs?) that leaves us with one option, and I think it is the best one: The Washington Football Team.
That name, which we enjoyed only for two years, was not so much chosen as it was bestowed on the team. The strange conflation of a summer’s worth of racial unrest and credible allegations of sexual impropriety in July 2020 finally forced Dan Snyder’s hand, and he dropped the Redskins name. But since the beginning of football season was just weeks away—and Snyder’s legal team didn’t have the wherewithal to secure the rights to another name—he was forced to settle on what most people decried as a bland placeholder.
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But even at the time, I saw things differently. Washington Football Team is a simple statement of fact—a plainspoken advertisement for itself, like all great American brands. And the fashion in which it fell upon the city was oracular: the name neither reveals nor conceals, but gives a sign. (And for die-hard Redskins fans, it was a tabula rasa. When someone said The Team, with a certain emphasis, you knew exactly what he meant.) And the name probably would have stuck around, too, after Taylor Heinicke’s miracle play in the 2021 Wildcard playoff game, had he led the team to victory and ended Tom Brady’s career early. How I wish he did! The thrill of a real win—the team’s first in the playoffs since 2005—would have been enough to make the placeholder permanent.
It wasn’t meant to be then. But now, with new ownership, there’s time again to make amends. “If one cannot attain to a high standard,” Shirley Hazzard wrote of her time at the United Nations, “the least one can do is to be disappointed in oneself.” That maxim could be applied to Washington and its football team as well. The past 20 years have been a mess of mismanagement, resentment, and wrecked quarterbacks. We’ve been given ample time to be disappointed in our shortcomings. Now it’s time to get back to basics: Washington. Football. Team.
Correction: An earlier version of this article said that the last Redskins Super Bowl was over 40 years ago. It was in fact in 1992, over 30 years ago.