Washington NFL team now called Commanders after dropping racist former nickname

The decision was unveiled after two seasons of playing as the Washington Football Team and 87 years as the Redskins, a moniker the team dropped in 2020 after amplified backlash over the name widely seen as a racial slur.

The team, which is keeping its burgundy and gold colours, said the new name pays tribute to the culture of leadership in the Washington area.

Now the newly minted Washington Commanders face the uphill climb of engaging with a fan base that was once one of football’s most fervent, but has seen the club struggle on the field and found itself at the centre of numerous controversies off of it.

In the past two years alone, Washington has been the subject of three crises: an investigation for widespread sexual and verbal harassment inside the workplace; a contentious and public dispute between owner Dan Snyder and his limited partners; and public pressure that finally forced the franchise to adopt a new name.

Snyder, the controversial boss at the centre of all of these issues, had long vowed to never change the name. NFL commissioner Roger Goodell had even backed the name over the years. It had survived decades of criticism from politicians and activists who decried it for being derogatory to Native Americans.

But against the backdrop of racial-justice protests that swept the country in 2020 after the killing of George Floyd, the landscape shifted. The NFL, which for years had been rocked by social-justice issues after Colin Kaepernick began protesting during the national anthem, pivoted to more forcefully support those causes. Goodell released a video encouraging players to peacefully protest and saying the league should have listened to players earlier.

That left one outstanding problem: squaring the league’s stance with one of its clubs names, which many saw as being in direct conflict with that mission.

Public pressure to change the name, though, wasn’t new to the franchise. What changed was when some of the biggest financial partners of the team and the league took a stance on the matter.

FedEx — the namesake of Washington’s stadium and run by Fred Smith, one of the club’s then-minority owners, who had been at odds with Snyder — asked for a name change on July 2, 2020. Nike, the official apparel partner of the NFL, took the club’s gear off its website. Other team sponsors, such as PepsiCo and Bank of America, joined the calls.

On July 3, 2020, Washington said it was launching a review of the name. Ten days later, it was officially dropped.

Before the 2020 season, the club decided to play as the Washington Football Team — a moniker that became a placeholder and eventually a permanent option. Other contenders had included the Armada, Presidents, Brigade, Red Hogs, Red Wolves and Defenders.

Then, after two seasons playing under the type of generic name that is more common in European soccer, the club chose Commanders. The club, in its release, said that the identity is “personified by mission-driven players who take command, forge success and break barriers on and off the field.”

“As an organisation, we are excited to rally and rise together as one under our new identity while paying homage to our local roots and what it means to represent the nation’s capital,” Dan Snyder said in a statement.

The selection resolves one of the problems surrounding the club Snyder had previously bought out the limited partners with whom he had been feuding. But the most prominent of those issues remains in the spotlight.

During the same month the team dropped its old name in 2020, the club hired attorney Beth Wilkinson to conduct a review of the franchise’s workplace culture in response to a Washington Post story in which 15 women described being sexually or verbally harassed while working there. More reports of malfeasance continued to emerge including incidents involving Snyder and a settlement he made with a woman. He denied wrongdoing and has apologised for the club’s broader workplace problems.

That investigation, which was eventually taken over by the NFL, finished last year. The team was fined $10 million and the league concluded there were numerous incidents of misconduct while senior executives essentially ignored the issues. But, unlike many past league-led investigations, the NFL did not produce a written report with specifics from the probe’s findings.

That led to sharp backlash, including from former team employees, over the lack of transparency. Those criticisms intensified after emails that surfaced in connection with the investigation led to the resignation of former Las Vegas Raiders coach Jon Gruden.

That’s when the House Oversight and Reform Committee launched an investigation into the NFL’s investigation. That’s actively ongoing: The powerful house committee is conducting a roundtable Thursday with former team employees for them to discuss the workplace misconduct inside the team that’s now called the Commanders.

– The Wall Street Journal