After playing two seasons without one, the Washington Commanders are getting the band back together and have a new flight song to go with their new name. Well, they will as soon as they get enough feedback.
Of course, just like everything else involving the re-brand – the uniforms, the colors – the organization is making room for newness, but not changing too much around.
The team announced they were seeking fan input on two options for new songs, but only made two minor changes to the lyrics to the song (“Hail to the Redskins”) that was once sung in Washington.
Both versions decide to eliminate the line "Braves on the Warpath!" in the first and fourth stanzas. Version one makes it: "Fight for our Commanders!"
On the first option, Reese Waters was left unimpressed. “Three outta ten. Three outta ten,” Waters said. “And really you maybe shouldn’t even give it [that much]. That might be high.”
In the second proposed version, the new line is: "Leaders on a Mission!"
“Alright, not terrible,” Waters said. “I mean, ‘leaders on a mission!’ makes me feel like I’m on my way to a meeting or something. Which, I guess, according to [Army veteran] David Harrison is actually more accurate for what a commander actually does. But ‘leaders on a mission!’ kinda makes me feel like we’re working on a group project.”
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The other change is the same in both, making the third stanza’s "Sons of Washington" with the more inclusive "All of Washington."
The Reese Waters Show producer Broc Plymin summed up his reaction to the two options as “an immediate palm to the forehead.”
“Just like the roll-out of the name Commanders, which it felt as though they had months and months to work on it, and then realized that they were expected to do this and then scrambled around and wrote some lyrics on a napkin on the way to the press conference,” Plymin said. “They are both very weak.”
For Waters, the repetition of the word Commanders in the first option makes the choice obvious, as he called the first version, “awful.”
“That is objectively terrible,” Waters said of the first option. “So ‘leaders on a mission!’ is way better… at its base ‘Hail to the Commanders’ that just doesn’t… you might just have to punt on the whole thing. You might just have to punt on the whole thing.
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“I don’t think you can get three syllables in there. I might be overthinking it, I don’t think you can get three syllables in there. I’m not, I’m not here for it. When they first said they were gonna rework the song I wasn’t completely opposed. But you can’t jam Commanders in there. I mean, it really feels like one of those guest verses on a hip-hop track that’s just trying way too hard. It just doesn't work.”
Plymin ended with a point that underlines the organization’s problem: They want to move on from the team’s former name (which they dropped under immense public pressure because of the accusations it was a racist slur) while continuing to honor the past name which the fanbase still mostly loved.
“They should have never mentioned it,” Plymin added. “They should have just played the instrumental and allowed fans to do what they are going do because fans are going to say the old name, we know that. This whole idea that the team saying… ‘we don’t want any part of that [old name], but at the same time we’re honoring all of this.’
“The frustrating reality [is that the team] can’t embrace the reality of the situation. They never were able to. The owner said a decade ago, ‘Put it in all caps, we will never change the name.’ Then there was pressure, they changed the name… they waited too long, and then the Commanders, they waited too long, all the way to get here. ‘Hail to the Commanders’ does not fit with the beats of the [old] song. You can’t do it. You can’t do it with the same syllables. You have to have matching syllables.”
So that’s a total re-write on the fight song. "Back to the lab," Waters said.
The full segment can be heard here beginning at 38:50