Let's Buy an NFL Team Part 2 - The Brand

Congratulations to us, we’ve bought an NFL team. After acquiring the necessary funding, we swooped in at the last second and purchased the Washington Commanders. Take that, Josh Harris!

Now we get to set about the real work of fixing our franchise, and the first order of business is to make it look better on the field.

The Washington NFL franchise has been mired in aesthetic and brand-related issues for more or less as long as I can remember. The team’s original name, the “Redskins,” was a problem, and subject to considerable debate. For my part, I think a simple litmus test for the name makes the best case against it: if people are regularly asking “hey, is your football team’s name considered a slur by anybody?” you probably have a bad name. It had to change.

So, after a couple of years as the Washington Football Team, they landed on “Commanders” as the team’s new nickname. I have heard worse names for sports teams, but after a multi-year process, I hoped for something better. And the team’s uniforms don’t do much for me, either. Between their bland on-field look and their uninspiring name, Washington looks like a team designed by a committee, full of compromises and safe choices.

But as the new owners of the Washington football team, we can do better. Let’s get this rebrand underway by picking a name.

Finding a new team name is a challenging process

If you look into how the franchise landed on “Commanders,” the name does start to make a little more sense. Even if it’s not a great name, it follows a couple of broad rules the franchise set for itself: they wanted to move away from names related to Native American imagery (no “Warriors,” for instance), they wanted to get away from names that invoked “red” in any way (to loosen ties to “Redskins,” I’d imagine), and they wanted broad ties to the military in some way (because of D.C.’s strong military history).

The supposed list of finalists checks most of these boxes. Armada, Brigade, Commanders, Defenders, Presidents, Red Hogs, Red Wolves, and Washington Football Team (as reported by CNN) generally fit with the franchise’s rules, and if that’s the list they were working from, I don’t really blame them for going with Commanders. It’s not the worst choice, and the better choices (Red Hogs and Red Wolves) have their problems.

Just to pick one alternative, the Red Wolves (a popular choice locally for reasons I don’t entirely understand) is already occupied by Arkansas State, complicating the process of working that into Washington’s brand.

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