 Last July Cleveland's baseball team enlisted none other than Tom Hanks to announce its new name. "We are a city of fire and water, of trees and towers," Hanks said in a sappy video before proclaiming, "We are all Cleveland Guardians."
The WFT missed an opportunity to enlist an even bigger celebrity for its grand announcement: Dr. Anthony Fauci.
"We are a city of political division and constant bickering," he might have said. "Of monuments and hyperbole." And then, with reporters ready to pounce no matter what the name turned out to be, Dr. Fauci would have winked and lowered his mask to declare, "We are all Washington Variants."
The beauty of Variants is that it also captures the vagaries of naming sports teams. Back in 2013 the Redskins owner, Daniel Snyder, famously told a reporter, "We'll never change the name. It's that simple. NEVER — you can use caps." But in years to follow, Mr. Snyder's corporate sponsors were flooded with demands to drop their support unless the name was dumped. Nike pulled its gear from the team's website, and FedEx, which holds naming rights for the team's stadium, threatened to remove its signage at a cost to the team of about $45 million. Not long after that, the name Redskins was scuttled.
Commanders is a timid choice. But there's just too much money in branding and merchandising to risk another name-related fiasco. Pro football should take a page from minor-league baseball, where the stakes are lower so the names tend to be whackier.
The Los Angeles Angels Double-A team calls itself the Rocket City Trash Pandas. The Cleveland Guardians have an affiliate named the Akron RubberDucks. The Arizona Diamondbacks team in Texas is called the Amarillo Sod Poodles. I've always had a fondness for the Phillies squad known as the Lehigh Valley IronPigs.
Football just doesn't get it. The new United States Football League kicks off April 16 with the Birmingham Stallions facing the New Jersey Generals. Really? The Harlem Globetrotters play a fake team called Generals—a name picked to mock bland sports monikers.
Other USFL teams are named Panthers, Gamblers, Maulers, Breakers, Bandits and—most creative of all—the Philadelphia Stars.
Then again, what's in a name? Few Nationals fans wish the baseball team was still called the Expos. And there's little nostalgia for the Baltimore Bullets, which became the Capital Bullets, and then the Washington Bullets, before rebranding themselves in 1997 as the Washington Wizards.
When the Commanders decide to change the name again, perhaps they could borrow from the Seattle Mariners Class-A team in Modesto, California. The squad has a name that captures what Modesto and Washington, D.C. both have in abundance.
It's called, simply, the Nuts.
(c) Peter Funt. Distributed by Cagle syndicate.
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