Coming soon: the NFL's D.C. Cabs?

If you ask me, you just will never get rid of these nicknames in sports -- and shouldn't, if there is some sort of tradition behind them. Political correctness (and sometimes, the outright stupidity from PC that come with it in its aftermath) goes too far.

What I mean by "outright stupidity" is that, after one team is pressured to make a change, suddenly, its more than just Indian nicks. There is a growing group of folks who want to, for lack of a better way of explaining it, sanitize the world. That's just not the real world. It would be nice, but it's not just the real world.

 

The GS-13s? The Beltways? The We're Owned by a Flaming Shitheel?

 

Would there be a court fight somehow if they became the Washington Federals (Old USFL franchise Name)?

Or maybe they could do what St. Louis did for decades and have both football and baseball franchises have the same moniker -- Nationals.

 

The Washington Spies, or The Washington Agents (NSA controversy-related).

 

So is there a trademark patent out there for Washington Buffalo Jockeys?

 

The Truth!

 

Why not? What intrinsic value does a sports team's "tradition" have that makes it untouchable?

 

The "tradition" started because the most racist owner in the league -- which, in the 1930s, was really saying something -- wanted to keep his logo after giving up the name Braves to the baseball franchise. The team has tried to create a bullshit story that it was to honor the Native American coach, but that's not true. From a 1933 AP article:

The edition includes a short Associated Press dispatch quoting Marshall saying: “The fact that we have in our head coach, Lone Star Dietz, an Indian, together with several Indian players, has not, as may be suspected, inspired me to select the name Redskins.”

Instead, Marshall explains, he gave up “Braves” to avoid confusion with a Boston professional baseball team of the same name. He apparently picked the Redskins name so he could keep the existing Native American logo.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/1933-news-article-refutes-cherished-tale-that-redskins-were-named-to-honor-indian-coach/2014/05/28/19ad32e8-e698-11e3-afc6-a1dd9407abcf_story.html

 

There's been public pressure on this issue with the league before. Maybe the noise is amped up a little more this time because its been festering a bit and Snyder has handled it so poorly. But I don't see a whole lot of difference between where we are at today and where we were in the late '90s when the USPTO did this before and there was public pressure at that time to change the name. When I lived in D.C. in 2001-02 the city council was working on a resolution asking the team to drop "Washington" from its name since they played in Maryland and used an offensive nickname.