The Washington Football team announced their new name this morning: The Commanders. They also unveiled their new uniforms. I’d give the name a B- and the uniforms a D-. There’s a lot of hate on the socials for the name. This is to be expected. People hold on tightly to things they are familiar with. As someone who was never a fan of the Washington football team in any of its previous identities, I feel I can have a little bit of objectivity about this.
The name Commanders is OK. It’s not great, but then a lot of NFL team nicknames aren’t great. Take the Packers, for example. The original team was sponsored by a meat packer, hence the name. If they gave a team that name today, there would be considerable backlash, I suspect. The Jaguars, Titans, Texans. These are all unimaginative names. But they are functional, and suited to the teams they describe. And so is Commanders. For a team that nominally plays in Washington, D.C. it’s an appropriate moniker. You’ve got a strong military presence in the nation’s capital, so it fits in that regard; and of course the Commander-in-Chief resides there, so it’s appropriate in that regard.
In a few years it’s not going to matter, any more than the renaming of any other team. Like the Cleveland Guardians. The highway guardians are deeply ingrained into the culture of the city of Cleveland. As it happens, I like that name very much. I like the sound of it. One thing they did right in Cleveland that Washington could have taken a lesson from but did not: the Guardians uniforms are more or less the same as the Indians’ had been; the only differences are the new team logo and the absence of the Chief Wahoo character.
The Washington team made wholesale changes, and it’s unfortunate. The WFT uniforms were changed very little with the stripping of the Redskins identity; the helmet logo was dropped in favor of the uniform number. That was pretty much it. The colors and style remained unchanged. I was hopeful that would remain the case. Just swap the new logo for the numbers on the helmet, and there you go. Done deal. Of course, they did not do this.
They changed a lot. Minimized the gold accents in favor of mostly burgundy, the shade of which seems lighter, although that could just be the picture I saw. They added a black jersey, which seems unnecessary, and worst of all, they changed the numeral font. The WFT jersey featured old-school block numbers, the kind that look like they belong on a football jersey. The new ones are rounded and more narrow. They wouldn’t look out of place on a soccer jersey, but they just don’t look right on a football uniform.
So in summary, the name is good, not great. The uniform is neither good nor great. At the end of the day, the games will go on next season and the rebranding will become less and less of a topic of conversation, and the uniforms will be exactly that. Having hideous uniforms didn’t hurt the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, although I do find it interesting that when Tom Brady joined the team they reverted to the uniforms they wore when they last won a championship. And then they won another one. And then Brady retired.
The truth is, no matter how passionate a fan you are, what a professional sports team does, especially with respect to branding and such, isn’t going to impact your life all that much. You might need to update your merchandise, but otherwise, life goes on.
