February 2nd won’t be a good day
January 18, 2022
by Steve Thomas
My response to Dan Snyder’s decision to announce a change of the name of the Washington Redskins back in July, 2020, was to write a satirical obituary for the Redskins name (click here to read). It’s one of my all-time favorite columns of the hundreds I’ve written for The Hog Sty. So now, 18 months later, after an insanely long, bungled, and unnecessary bout of corporate hand-wringing, the front office is on the verge of announcing the new name, live on NBC’s Today Show on the morning of February 2 at Fed Ex Field.
How do I feel about this? I’m not excited at all. In fact, my primary emotions are some mixture of disgust and sadness. Over the past 18 months, the existence of the interim name “Washington Football Team” has allowed me to pretend, to some extent, that this travesty of justice hasn’t occurred. But now, when February 2 arrives, the “Redskins” name will truly be dead. Some new team is going to trot out of the tunnel for week 1 this coming September, and I won’t recognize who they are or be able to continue to reminisce about the glory years in the same way.
I’m not here to discourage anyone from being excited about the name change or the new uniforms, to stop playing detective with team videos looking for uniform clues, or anything else. In fact, I’ve done my part by being one of the primary sources for news and insight into the trademark issues. Feel how you feel about it, and if you’re excited about the future, more power to you.
What I really wanted to say today is directly mostly at the front office. I hope they understand that a certain portion of this fanbase, including me, remains uninterested in rooting for a team that isn’t called the Redskins and are completely unexcited for the big reveal in a couple weeks. None of the realistic candidates – Commanders, Admirals, Armada, or any of the rest – will ever be the team of my youth. Although I lived in the DMW area on three separate occasions, I’m not a DMV native and did not become a fan of this team simply because they were my hometown team. I was a military kid and don’t have a hometown. I feel no obligation to just blindly continue to follow a team that has bowed down before the scourge of political correctness and cancel culture – two of the great blights on today’s society – to take away a venerable name that wasn’t hurting anyone and replace it with some bland, boring garbage nickname primarily selected so as to not offend anyone. The Redskins mystique and memories are too important to me to accept that.
It’s not an exaggeration or hyperbole to say that Daniel Snyder’s ownership tenure has destroyed this fanbase. It’s gone from one of the most passionate and loyal groups to one mostly featuring apathy to open contempt. A large, national fanbase has dwindled down to the smallest group in the NFL, at least as measured by game attendance. Toss in the replacement of the Redskins cheerleaders with some ugly monstrosity called the “Entertainment Team”, and you have laughter, not reverence. Did Jason Wright and company not see the irony in getting rid of the cheerleading squad when they were the principal victims of the toxic, sexist culture that pervaded the team for all of these years? Your response to verifiable allegations of their poor treatment was to get rid of them? If you think that the “Entertainment Team” is about anything other than conforming to modern political correctness, I don’t know what to tell you. Count me out.
Remember when this team featured the longest consecutive streak of sellouts in American sports? Today, as our friend Rick Snider has stated on several occasions, on gamedays Fed Ex Field doesn’t feature more than about 20,000 or so Washington fans at most, sometimes less, with the bulk of the attendees being fans of the opposing team. It’s just sad. Now, the front office expects us to blindly transfer our loyalties to this franchise to some team with a different name? Many will, mostly the locals and the younger set who will look at this as either more of an expansion franchise-type of do-over or as a hometown obligation. But another, smaller group of fans probably won’t. A handful may go to other teams, but others will lose interest altogether. Twenty years from now, the collective memories of the Redskins franchise will be mostly gone, with an entirely new era and new group of fans taking our place. That’s certainly the goal of the front office.
So, no, I’m not excited about the February 2 event or the February 4 after party, and I’m not waiting with baited breath to see what the new logo is going to look like. I didn’t play detective and study every frame of the preview video, and I don’t have my DVR set to record the Today Show. This franchise has asked its fans to put up with 25 or so years of a mostly mediocre to awful product on the field, a never-ending series of calamities in the front office and off the field, one of the worst stadiums in the league, high prices, and an owner and two former team presidents who’ve shown what I’ll generously call “contempt” towards the fans. Now, they are going to ask me to dump the name “Redskins” and all that it has meant to me for most of my life? And just blindly love this new team? Let me get back to you on that.
Those of us who run and do work for The Hog Sty and sites like it do it as a labor of love, not as a career choice or as a pay-per-click money-making venture. We do it because we are fanatics – Redskins fanatics – and the idea of blindly turning this into a Washington Armada, or whatever, site, doesn’t seem right to me. I don’t know what this means for my future with this team or with this site. We’ll have to see how I feel on February 2 and beyond. One thing’s for sure: I won’t be proudly wearing any of the new gear or cheering on the Washington Commanders.
Once again, I’m not trying to discourage anyone. At the end of the day, unless you’re a paid media member or team employee who makes a living from this franchise, this is just escapist entertainment. Enjoy it how you choose. For me, 18 months later, I still don’t know what it’s going to mean to me going forward. We’ll find out. Hail to the Redskins.