Most D.C.-area sports fans dislike or hate Commanders’ name, poll finds

In fact, only 16 percent of Commanders fans think the team should keep the name, while most say they would like the team to change to a different name. Again.

“I’ve been a fan for a long time, since I was a little kid, and obviously the old name was a little problematic. I saw that,” D.C. resident Andrew Ravenscroft said. “I was in favor of changing it. But it’s just kind of a strange name.”

In July 2020, after then-owner Daniel Snyder faced mounting pressure from sponsors and local officials, the team announced it would retire its controversial Redskins name and begin a “thorough” search for a new one. The franchise adopted the name Washington Football Team for 18 months, then unveiled the Commanders name, logo and uniforms during a chilly ceremony at its Landover stadium in February 2022.

Almost immediately, the rebrand was panned. According to a citywide Washington Post poll taken that month, 49 percent of District residents reported disliking the name, including 17 percent who said they hated it. A similar 48 percent of D.C. residents dislike the team name this spring, including 15 percent who say they hate it.

“I’m not surprised,” said George Perry, a former vice president of strategic marketing for the team and now an instructor of management and marketing at Christopher Newport University. “When you’ve been rooting for something for [87] years or whatever the number of years was, you’re pretty attached to it, no matter what everybody else’s feeling is about that brand. The Super Bowls are attached to it, your favorite players are attached to it, you had jerseys, you had shirts. Getting fans to support another name, I think, was going to be a challenge no matter what the name was.”

No NFL team has changed its name three times in a decade without changing regions. Doing so is costly, and the league’s bylaws stipulate that a franchise can change its name, logo and uniforms only once every five years. But there are exceptions, including a change in ownership.

Perhaps it was no surprise, then, that shortly after Snyder sold the team to an investment group led by Josh Harris last July, calls for the team to scrap its name seemed to intensify.

In an open-ended follow-up question in the latest poll, some fans volunteered suggestions, which varied widely. Three percent of Commanders fans offered “Redwolves,” another 2 percent suggested “Warriors,” 2 percent said “Red Tails” and a smaller percentage posed “Red Skin Potatoes.”

During the club’s 18-month search for a name, it eliminated Redwolves and Wolves (and variations of such) because of trademark conflicts. It also ruled out Warriors because of its association with Native American themes.

“Such an embrace of potentially Native-adjacent iconography and imagery would not represent a clear departure that many communities have so forcefully advocated for us to embrace, and that frankly, we set out to do when we started this process a year ago,” President Jason Wright said in a lengthy 2021 post on the team’s website.

Matt Price, a Montgomery County resident who was in favor of the team moving on from the old name — “It was long overdue, and I was very happy to hear it,” he said — believes the current name is “pretentious and pompous.”

“Who gets excited about that?” he said.

Price suggested choosing a generic animal but admitted he would be fine with the team going back to its temporary moniker, the Washington Football Team. And he’s not alone; 17 percent said they would prefer a change back to that name.

But a pocket of fans — 16 percent — volunteered a return to the Redskins name in the poll. John Nabinett Jr., a D.C. native who grew up near RFK Stadium, is among them.

“You still got the Atlanta Braves running around … and the Chiefs in the NFL,” he said, pointing to other pro teams with Native American-themed names. “That seems like a bias when it comes to Washington. Commanders is okay, but it doesn’t reflect the historical value and things like that of a rich program or a team. Commanders is a name, but it’s not an identity. Washington Redskins was an identity.”

Washington’s former name was also a source of contention for decades and became a barrier to the team’s potential return to D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D), who has long lobbied for the NFL franchise to move back to the District and play at the federally owned RFK Stadium site, made it clear that the team first had to change its name.

“People tend to forget that one of the main reasons that they stopped using that name was the pressure they got from their sponsors,” Perry said. “All these other sponsors said, ‘Hey, if you don’t change the name, we’re not going to give you any money.’ That hasn’t necessarily changed. … If it were me, I don’t think it would be my highest priority [to change the name] because you would be starting from scratch again.”

Harris’s group did not rule out a future name change when it purchased the team, but it quickly ruled out a return to the former name.

“That ship has sailed,” Mitch Rales, the top partner in Harris’s ownership group, said in September. “We’re not going to re-litigate the past. We’re about the future. We’re about building the future and not having a divisive culture that we’re engaged in. We’re going to look at everything come the end of the year and think about a lot of different things and do a lot of testing and see what people think. And we’ll learn. The beauty is we have the time to look at all of this stuff intelligently and make fan-based decisions.”

A person with knowledge of ownership’s plans reiterated this month that it has no immediate plans in the works to change the name. The group has repeatedly stressed that it has other priorities. This offseason, the Commanders overhauled their front office, coaching staff and roster. The owners have invested more than $75 million in upgrades to the stadium in Landover and practice facility in Ashburn. They’re also searching for a new naming rights partner for the current stadium and awaiting the outcome of legislation that could make the RFK site available for a new facility and ancillary development.

Despite the name (and logo) remaining a point of contention for some, new ownership has been a source of optimism for many Commanders fans.

A 77 percent majority of Commanders fans (and D.C.-area residents overall) have a positive view about Harris’s leadership. Among Commanders fans in the District, 83 percent are optimistic about Harris.

“I like what he’s done,” Ravenscroft said. “We haven’t had a lot of success yet, but he’s worlds ahead of Dan Snyder.”

Washington’s NFL team was once the focal point of D.C. sports, but its popularity has waned in recent years. Now, under half of D.C.-area sports fans say they root for the Commanders, ranking below the Nationals (59 percent) and Capitals (50 percent). Less than four in 10 local sports fans say they’re fans of the Wizards (37 percent).

Price, like Ravenscroft and Nabinett, is hoping that Harris will lead the franchise back to what it once was.

“It was embarrassing to have such an awful owner, and it was certainly embarrassing to have such a racist name,” Price said. “So, yes, with new ownership, it almost gives permission to be a big fan again.”

The poll was conducted April 19-29 by The Post and the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University among a random sample of 1,683 adult residents in the Washington, D.C. area, including 1,295 sports fans and 640 Commanders fans. The overall margin of error is plus or minus 3.2 percentage points and is 3.6 points among sports fans, 5.1 points among Commanders fans and smaller among subsets of each.

Scott Clement contributed to this report.