Well, it was a long way to go to correct a mistake that's rankled fans since the Commanders rebrand launch three weeks ago, but Washington has arrived at the appropriate conclusion nevertheless.
The Commanders have issued a new team crest, updating the dates on the lower-right quadrant to accurately reflect the seasons in which they won Super Bowls.
"We heard you loud and clear," the organization said in a social media post revealing its new, new crest. "Going forward, our crest will reflect our Super Bowl victories using the year from that regular season."
It's customary (and commonly known) in the NFL that, when referencing championship years, to use the year of the season in which the team won. For Washington's Super Bowl years, that would have been the 1982, 1987 and 1991 seasons.
Instead, the initial Commanders crest included the years 1983, 1988 and 1992, the years in which the Super Bowl games were actually played. 1937 and 1942 signify Washington's championships won prior to the AFL-NFL merger, before the "Super Bowl" — as it later came to be known —existed.
Last week it was reported that the Commanders planned to revise their crest by replacing the numeric years with the Roman numerals associated with the Super Bowls they won. That attempt was, embarrassingly, rebuffed by the NFL over intellectual property concerns.
Under the old crest, Washington was effectively appropriating championship years from the Raiders (1983), 49ers (1988) and Cowboys (1992), made even more humiliating by the fact that it was the Redskins who lost 38-9 to the Raiders in Super Bowl XVIII.
It remains difficult to fathom a franchise failing so publicly to properly execute its own brand rollout (for which it had a year and a half to prepare), especially one that was coordinated with a national television network. But, alas, the error has been corrected, which should warrant some measure of acknowledgement.
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