Danny wants a Commanders rebrand to be a top priority - and Grant thinks it could be higher, at least?
If you heard the Junkies on Monday morning, you heard Cakes say three things: he thinks a Commanders rebrand should be a priority, the Wizards name stinks, and Danny Rouhier agrees on No. 1.
Ol’ funny Danny agrees on the Wiz name too – “I'm stuck with it forever, a team name that I'm embarrassed about” he said Monday – but the important one is the former, and yes, we’ve known Mr. Rouhier, like Cakes, needs to see the name Commanders go bye-bye sooner than sooner, forget later.
But after hearing Mark Ein’s appearance on Kevin Sheehan’s podcast, which Sheehan rebroadcast on his Team 980 show Monday, where he said a rebrand is ‘a really big lift’ and ‘it is not taking a moment of focus’ for the ownership right now…that’s a no from Danny, dawg.
“This is essentially what they've been saying the entire time, so that’s nothing new, but it’s a minority owner on the record directly answering that question, which is rare,” Grant said. “We have not heard much about this, but they’ll occasionally answer the question about a possible rebrand with rhetoric like that, and the number one priority is the stadium.”
“Yeah, the Harris rhetoric, to me, has been, ‘we are prioritizing other things right now,’ but that to me added a, ‘you guys don't know how hard it is to do a rebrand.’ No one will hear this caveat, and I’m a huge fan of this ownership group, but I think there are a couple of misses, and this is one of them,” Danny replied. “I've been thrilled with their approach, and they’ve done so much well, and it’s obviously such night and day from that little twerp tyrant – but I think they are not doing the right thing here.”
To Danny, using ‘it’s hard’ as a big reason for a rebrand is just not a good enough excuse.
“When you tell me that one of the reasons why you're not prioritizing it is because it's hard, I cannot stomach that. I don't like that at all,” Danny said. “It's hard for the restaurant to serve fresh food. It's hard for the plane to land every time. You know what else is hard? Three decades of no 11-win seasons, and being embarrassed to be a fan of your team and having to justify it and swim through nonsense. That's hard. I've done the hard. You don't tell me how hard it is, you tell me that you're working on it or it's done or you're not doing it. I’m a big boy, I can take it. So I don’t like this one bit. Get my ship to shore, don’t tell me how tiny the parking spot is. And I refuse to believe this is too big of an undertaking and they’re not doing it because it’s too hard.”
“I view it differently – you hear him saying I can't clean my room, it's too difficult, and I hear him saying I can't clean my room because it takes three hours and I don't have three free available hours today. And I think that's very, very different,” Grant replied. “He is saying he needs that to clean the room correctly, and he doesn’t have it. I buy that to an extent, but here is the debate I think is the one to have: are they miscalculating where this should rank on their priority list? Is their calculation right?”
Yes, that’s what Danny’s counter was going to be, but Grant’s was that ‘he’s saying I need to have other rooms clean because that’s what people will see,” as in they need the stadium and other general items cleaned up before the name – but he does believe that the rebrand should be higher, even if not No. 1, because ‘that could actually make a lot of the little things on the list better.”
Take a listen to the entire conversation above!
