The lasting lines of Jason Wright's four-year tenure as team president in Washington will be jutting his right thumb toward Doug Williams and saying "Doug, what is it?" before letting out a sheepish, "We are the Commanders," on Feb. 2, 2022 after the former Super Bowl winner's proclamation and Craig Melvin's punctuating guffaw.
"Every time I hear that I laugh, but I also cringe," Kevin Sheehan said. "That was a beauty of a day, wasn't it? The day it all sunk in that the old name was truly gone and what they decided on to replace it, wasn't just bad – the presentation of it made it feel even worse."
And that perhaps will be the lasting legacy of Wright's time in Washington after it was announced he would be leaving his position as president immediately and transitioning to a senior adviser role before departing the organization by the end of the 2024 NFL season: The presentation made everything feel worse.
Of course, it should be remembered when considering the legacy of Wright that "anybody that came into this organization – and worked for – when Dan Snyder was the owner, didn't have much chance to succeed," Sheehan said.
Sheehan remembered Brian Lafemina, who was basically "handpicked by the league" to help Bruce Allen and Snyder fix a fracturing relationship with the team and the fan base in 2018, lasted less than a year.
"Nobody, whether qualified or unqualified, whether truly capable and of quality or not capable and of bad quality, nobody was going to make it and thrive and succeed in an organization that was so dysfunctional from the top down," Sheehan added of the Snyder Era. "Regardless of what you think of Jason Wright, no one from during that time from 1999 until the summer of 2023 had much of a chance to succeed in that organization."
Sheehan recognized that we do not know everything about Wright's job – much happening behind the scenes with respect to corporate sponsors and selling the team that Wright might have been very good and successful at – but all that did happen that was front-facing was "not something that went well almost ever."
Overall, Sheehan said that the "turd that he left everybody: the name and the associated brand," is what Wright will be most harshly and – possibly because of Snyder's hand in all of this – unfairly judged.
"It didn't matter who was involved with trying to come up with the new name and the new brand. It was a challenge that was almost impossible," Sheehan said. "When you have an 85-year-old attachment emotionally to a name and to a brand and it's been lost and you have to replace it, it's impossible to come up with the right answer. It's super hard right now to come up with a new answer to this.
"So. I don't know whether or not it would have been received any better had the people who were entrusted with handling that process been people that understood the fan base, understood the tradition. It really did, as I've said for two and a half years now, it really did feel like a bunch of outsiders and came in and handled this in a hit-and-run situation."
Sheehan said the organization "didn't get it right," but he isn't sure that even people who understood the fan base could have gotten it right either.
"There's no other way to say it," Sheehan says in taking stock in all of this. "The Jason Wright tenure was a disaster as team president on front-facing things.
"Seventy to 80 percent of his job, we didn't see, I can't comment on. He may have been phenomenal in other areas of his job description and job responsabilities. But the stuff that we did see, it didn't go well. Almost all of it didn't go well. Right from the beginning."
Sheehan lists a few: The 50-50 raffle check that bounced, the ill-fated fan cruise that never left the dock, and the rushed Sean Taylor jersey retirement, which he called "one of the most embarrassing weekends, and that's saying something, in the organization's history." (A weekend that included his family taking a photo in front of a street sign for Sean Taylor Road with a row of porta-potties right behind them.)
The next year the Commanders flopped with the wire mannequin for Taylor, also.
On the big reveal of the new name on Groundhog's Day in 2022 – no singular day more important in the recent history of the franchise for many fans – Sheehan called it "a botched" day.
"Nothing could have been more amateur and embarrassing than 2/2/22," Sheehan said. "And everything that was rolled out including the uniforms just made it feel like an XFL expansion team had landed in town. The lackluster, uninspiring energy on that Today Show on 2/22/22 told you all you needed to know because they didn't feel it.
"They were working on it and they couldn't feel the energy associated with it. And then everything that happened at FedEx Field. From Dan coming up there in sweatpants and sweatshirt and wandering around on stage."
Sheehan added: "All of this was poor.... it was one thing after another.... they just didn't get any of it right... When he was hired there was some renewed hope that 'maybe this guy will be the answer.' But every public-facing moment went poorly. And there was never really a sense of accountability for those failures either."