Washington Football Team Narrows New Name Options Down to 3 Candidates

Washington Football Team is getting close to having a new name. Team president Jason Wright went to Twitter on Thursday morning to confirm that officials have narrowed the search down to three candidates. He also clarified the eight names that appeared on a team video.

Wright first announced the news with Washington coach Ron Rivera in the YouTube series Making the Brand. “So the three that we’ll go through are: [beeped out], [beeped out] and [beeped out],” Wright teased in the video, per CBS Sports. Wright went on to reveal that process was finding a new name has been a long process.

“We started out with 40,000 submissions and began from there to winnow down to a smaller amount,” Wright says in the video. “It gave us a broad view of how the public and the fan base feel about us as an organization and where they want to see us go.” No matter what the new name will be, Washington will have it and a new logo by the start of the 2022 season. Last year, PopCulture.com spoke to Marcus Stephenson, vice president, digital marketing and programming for the Washington Football Team, and he talked about how fans have been very involved in the naming process.

“We’re getting thousands and thousands of submissions,” he said. “It’s anything and everything. We wanted to keep it an open book like that because we want to be able to showcase some of the submissions the fans have been sending in as a proof point of the inclusive nature of this process. Some have been amazing ideas. As we start to move forward throughout the season beginning in the fall, we wanted to make sure we had an ongoing dialogue with our fans. This destination really allows us to do that on an everyday basis.”

Washington dropped its controversial nickname and logo last summer amid the Black Lives Matter movement. The team had had the nickname in Washington since 1937 but also had it when they were in Boston from 1933-1936.