Washington Commanders team president Jason Wright tells The Team 980’s Kevin Sheehan the organization picked the new name, whether the Super Bowl dates on the new crest can be changed, and reveals new details about Red Wolves and Warriors.
After 579 days without a permanent name, the Commanders were born, but was the initial name going to change to Warriors?
“Warriors was one that I think, and I wasn’t here in July 2020, but I do know was a primary focus at the time,” Wright told Sheehan.
“And there’s many things to love about that [name], in fact, I’m on record talking about so many of the aspects that I do feel are captured in the name Commanders, a sense of assertiveness and strength, of grit and resilience, many of the principles that our fans told us they wanted,” he said. “I wrote about this, in doing real and deep engagement with the Native and Indigenous community they steered us away from that. And that was something that we wanted to respect. The voices we wanted to prioritize.”
Wright told Sheehan the team settled on the name Commanders several months before the Feb. 2 announcement.
“It was about four months ago we really settled in,” Wright said on The Team 980. “And I remember we were in a session, and we had actually fully designed out nine to 12 brand or name identities. Full logo, full watermark, full uniforms, how it looked on the ticker on NFL Network what it looked like against other NFL logos. And we were just looking at those every single day.
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"And at some point, all of us were looking at the Commanders layout and, we felt this is it. It really means something deep, it’s got depth and meaning. And one of the folks in the room, who it wasn’t their favorite at the beginning said, ‘you know what I think this is it. It has grown over time to be stronger and stronger than some of the other options we’re looking at. There’s a chance for us to add more meaning to this over time, for the fans to run with it, I think this is it.’”
Wright wouldn’t name who that person in the room was when asked by Sheehan, and when pressed to reveal more of the people in the group, Wright said “Me, Dan and Tanya [Snyder], a selection of folks on our leadership team, alumni were engaged, there was a set of folks, probably a couple dozen folks that were in the inner-circle of folks who made that decision.”
When asked to share the three finalists and to give more specifics about who was involved in the decision-making, Wright declined.
One thing that bothered Sheehan and many fans were the years of Washington’s three Super Bowl wins on the team’s new crest.
“You guys got the championship seasons wrong, are you gonna fix it?” Sheehan asked.
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“Well, the usual nomenclature for the Super Bowl championships is, ‘the 1983 Super Bowl champions were the Washington Redskins…’” Wright said.
“No, it’s not,” Sheehan interjected. “That’s not true.”
“That’s actually how it gets documented in the NFL annals,” Wright said. “But, it’s something that we can easily fix, we can easily fix it the next time we re-do the logo if fans prefer a different methodology. But we chose to go with the official way that it’s logged in NFL annals. If you look at last year, the 2021 Super Bowl champs were the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, that’s how it gets documented. And so, that’s what we went with. And we thought it was consistent because the [NFL] championships that predate the Super Bowls, those were played in the same year as the full season. And we wanted to be consistent across it.”
Of course, in the section on History on the Commanders' official website, it says this: “In addition to NFL Championship Game victories in 1937 and 1942, the Washington Football Team have won three Super Bowls, culminating their 1982, 1987 and 1991 seasons with Super Bowl titles.”
Further down on the same page of the team’s site, a video is entitled: "1982 Super Bowl XVII Champions."
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