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Nearly two years after temporarily changing its name to the “Washington Football Team,” the Washington, D.C.-based NFL team will soon have a new, permanent name.
The team announced that it will unveil its new name and logo on Feb. 2 in a seven-minute video featuring franchise legends like Doug Williams and Joe Gibbs that went viral on Tuesday morning.
The team’s previous name came under heavy scrutiny for having racial overtones after being criticized by Native American advocacy groups for decades. Team owner Daniel Snyder vowed to “never” chance the name until recently, when the club decided to use the Washington Football Team as a placeholder name until it could choose a full-time name that wasn’t offensive or racially insensitive.
The Washington Football Team also noted that its new name will not be “wolves” or “redwolves,” a pair of ideas the team says were fan favorites.
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“We are confident that this identity is one that our team and our fans across D.C., Maryland, Virginia and beyond can rally behind for another 90 years and more as we continue to cheer on the Burgundy & Gold in this next chapter,” team president Jason Wright wrote in a Tuesday morning blog post.
“Our journey to a new identity is a marathon, not a sprint,” Wright also said in a trailer teasing the new name. “To get it right, we had to take every step of the process seriously, and the destination is a sum of all those parts.”
Football fans began circulating their picks and guesses for the Washington Football Team’s new name on social media on Tuesday, leading names like “Commanders,” “Admirals” and “Redtails” to trend on Twitter.
And because the new name will be announced on Feb. 2, which is Groundhog Day, some also mused whether the team would even call itself the Washington Groundhogs.
But other fans are content to keep the name the same,
Whatever the new name is, it’s possible the moniker will lead to a surge in jersey sales for the team, as well as a boom in overall merchandise interest.
“This will be a big event,” Matt Powell, Senior Industry Advisor at research firm NPD, told MarketWatch during the team’s 2020 name change. “Not every Washington fan will go out and get a new jersey, but many will.”
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In a somewhat similar situation, MLB’s Cleveland franchise changed its name from the Indians to the Guardians after receiving similar criticism from many groups. The Cleveland team also changed its logo, which previously featured a smiling red Indian face.
