The Washington Commanders will face off against the Philadelphia Eagles this Sunday in the NFC Championship Game, continuing an unexpectedly successful season that has the franchise on the brink of its first Super Bowl appearance since 1992. The team’s resurgence has delighted its long-suffering fanbase—but will it also help them accept the team’s less-than-beloved nickname?
After decades of using a controversial moniker, the franchise rebranded in 2020 as the Washington Football Team. Two years later, it adopted Commanders, a name that was initially met with antipathy. Rumors and speculation about a third name change have since floated around, and in the early days after owner Josh Harris took over the team, he and others seemed to drop hints that “Commanders” might not be long for this world.
But that was then. In the here and now, it’s possible that the exceptional vibes surrounding the team—finally free of widely-loathed former owner Dan Snyder and any assorted lingering accursed spirits; boasting a star quarterback in rookie sensation Jayden Daniels; enjoying a wild and improbable run of nail-biting victories en route to its showdown with the Eagles—could leave locals feeling warmer about its current nickname (and, just maybe, even the unofficial “Commies”).
“It’s becoming harder and harder to change it again with each win, and there might be less and less hunger to change it,” says Grant Paulsen, a sports talk radio host on 106.7 the Fan. “They’re having their best year that they’ve had in 33 years. The year that this fanbase has been dreaming about for decades.”
Says John Keim, a Commanders reporter for ESPN: “Jayden Daniels came here as a Washington Commander. If you go on a Super Bowl run with this name, do you really want to start changing it?”
Some fans—who tend to be, uh, vocal online—have held out hope that the franchise will revert to its longtime nickname. Could that happen? Jim Rocco, a sports branding expert, says that’s extremely unlikely—and not just because that name is considered by many to be racially insensitive. “I think no matter where you stand politically, you have to remember that this was associated with the Daniel Snyder era, which was a low point in the Washington franchise history,” says Rocco, director of sports PR brand PRCG Sports.
An entirely new name remains possible, though the process of making such a change would be lengthy and expensive; owner Josh Harris and other franchise higher-ups would have to decide that the financial juice of such a change would be worth the squeeze. Yet even if the franchise sticks with Commanders, other, less drastic shifts in the team’s branding and identity could arrive in the future.
“I think what you’ll see is they’re going to try to do a better job moving forward, with some kind of subtle ways of paying homage to the past while keeping the current name,” says Paulsen. “And so maybe that means making your uniforms look more like they did during the Joe Gibbs 1.0 era.”
Alternately, change could look forwards instead of backwards. The current logo—a giant W—fits with the Commanders’ current hot streak, but is also, generously speaking, nondescript. Could it be replaced with something entirely new?
“The way they branded it, I don’t have any attachments to who is the Commander or what is the icon besides that W,” says Tom O’Grady, a sports branding strategist and the founder of Gameplan Creative, who previously worked with the Commanders on a redesign in 2005. “Let’s create a new Commanders logo with a bit more of an Army or Navy thing. Something that has a little bit more symbolism.”
