After two years of speculation, the Washington Football Team will announce Wednesday its new name.
After years of complaints about Washington's racist connotations towards Native Americans, Washington changed its name to the Redskins in July 2020.
"On July 3rd, we announced the start of a thorough team name review... Today we are announcing that we will be retiring both the Redskins logo and name upon completion of this review," said the team in a statement on July 3, 2020.
Two weeks later, the team adopted the generic Washington Football Team name. However, it was intended to be in place only for the 2020-21 season. As it was working out a new name, and complications regarding copyrights, the team decided to keep its name for another season.
In September, Tanya Snyder (Washington co-CEO), owner Daniel Snyder's spouse, said to ESPN that the company had narrowed down the final eight candidates to Armada and Brigade, Commanders Defenders, Defenders and Presidents, Redhawks RedWolves, and the current Football Team.
Team President Jason Wright, however, announced last month that RedWolves will no longer be the team's name. This was due to copyright issues.
Wright stated in that "early on we understood Wolves (or some variation thereof) was one of our favorite fan favorites," as he wrote in , a post on the team’s website . As I have said, we value feedback from our fans and put Wolves on the list of possible options. After we started looking into Wolves, however we realized a significant challenge: trademarks owned by other teams would limit the ability to make this name our own. RedWolves and variations like it wouldn't be possible without Wolves.
Daniel Snyder has long maintained that he would not change the name of the team despite protests from Native American groups and activists. Snyder, however, announced that the team would begin a review of its name after the protests against George Floyd's death in summer 2020. He also sent a letter to shareholders and several Minneapolis police officers.
Wright stated last month that the team name was already decided. However, it has not been leaked. In an interview with CBS Sports Radio this week, Joe Theismann, a Washington legend who led the team in Super Bowl 17 victory, suggested that the new name would be the Commanders. He said that he believed the Commanders was a name people will like moving forward. There were many options.
Later he told The Washington Times that he didn't know it would be Commanders.
Wright stated that he hopes the new name of the team will please the fans.
Wright stated in January that while it was difficult to choose a name that fans will identify with, Wright expressed excitement about the final selection. Wright said, "And although we've always known it would be nearly impossible to pick a name that all our fans would identify as their first choice, we have always believed it would be an almost impossible task.
