Washington Football Team finally has a new name and logo. On Tuesday, the team announced that its new name is the Commanders. Along with the new name, the Commanders also showed off their new logo and uniforms. This comes after a news station leaked the team name on Tuesday night.
For the last two seasons, Washington played under Washington Football Team as it launched its search for a new name. The franchise asked for the fans’ help to come up with a permanent name, and when PopCulture.com spoke to Marcus Stephenson, vice president, digital marketing and programming for Washington, he said they were getting their fair share of submissions.
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We’re getting thousands and thousands of submissions,” Stephenson 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.”
In 2020, Washington dropped the “Redskins” name after having it since 1933. The organization has received its share of backlash for the name over the years, and with the Black Lives Matter movement going on at the time, Washington decided it was time for a change.
Last month, Washington team president Jason Wright explained why Wolves or RedWolves couldn’t be the new name despite those being popular among fans. “Early on we understood Wolves — or some variation of it — was one of our fan favorites,” Wright said. “As I’ve said all along, we take feedback from our fans seriously, and because of your interest in this name, we put Wolves on a list of options to explore fully. Once we began looking into Wolves, however, we became aware of a notable challenge: trademarks held by other teams would limit our ability to make the name our own. And without Wolves, variations like RedWolves wouldn’t have been viable either for these and other reasons.”
