The Washington Commanders are working to correct a blatant mistake made on their official team crest unveiled earlier this month, but are receiving pushback from the NFL, reports Michael Phillips for the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
When the new name and logo were revealed, accompanying the new marks was a crest, signifying that Washington Football was first established in 1932. Along the bottom of the crest, all of the team's championship years are listed, only part of which are accurate by league standards.
On one side, you can see 1937 and 1942, accurately reflecting Washington's pre-AFL-NFL merger championship years. On the other are 1983, 1988, 1992, demarking the actual years in which Washington won Super Bowls as the Redskins. Only, Super Bowl championships are typically referenced by the year of the season in which they were won, which, for Washington, would be the 1982, 1987 and 1991 seasons.
It was a pretty glaring oversight for anyone familiar with how the NFL likes to present its history. It's also a mistake the team is actively working to amend.
However, the team contends it was no oversight. As a matter of fact, team president Jason Wright says they chose those years by design, defending them a day after the unveiling to The Team 980's Kevin Sheehan.
"That's actually how it gets documented in the NFL annals," Wright said of the Super Bowl dates. "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."
Regardless of how we arrived here, it's clear changes need to be made.
According to Phillips, Washington has since tweaked its crest, changing the years to the Roman numerals of the games (XVII, XXII and XXVI) instead of the years themselves. But after submitting them to the NFL for approval, Washington's alterations were denied, Phillips reports.
A source with knowledge of the situation tells Phillips that Washington is still "brainstorming ways to tweak the crest to reflect the fan feedback that has been received."
UPDATE: Apparently Washington is free to change the numbers on its crest, just not to Roman numerals, per John Keim.
