Washington’s NFL team has no timetable for new name
Yahoo Sports' Charles Robinson and Terez Paylor discuss Washington's ongoing team name change. Subscribe to the Yahoo Sports NFL Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Video Transcript
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TEREZ PAYLOR: Washington's professional football team, which has had a nickname that we're not going repeat on this podcast any longer, for 87 years. It won three Super Bowls and five championships with it. They will not be called that anymore. The new name has not been settled on.
And that was news that came about over the weekend. And it's really kind of set off a tremendous amount of discussion over the last several days. And I love the fact in your column-- and you can talk about this-- that you pointed out that it probably wasn't a mistake the order in which Washington listed the reasons for the change, right?
CHARLES ROBINSON: Yes.
TEREZ PAYLOR: Sponsors came first.
CHARLES ROBINSON: Yes. Sponsors, fans, community. In two sentences in that release, they made sure to let everyone know they were leaning into it. And it was sponsors first, then fans, then community. But, you know, a lot of people upset about it.
You know, I've heard a lot of the well, it was a Native American who designed it. OK, that was 50 years ago. Things have changed in 50 years. Like, you know, oh, well-- you know, people keep pointing out these isolated-- these Native Americans like it. And like, you know what, man? Here's the thing.
When you change something like this, you can call it p.c., virtuous signaling, blah, blah, blah, all this different stuff. But the bottom line is it's widely accepted-- widely accepted that it's racist. That's it. Like, it's not-- I know some people don't want to agree with that, because you can pick and choose some people who say it's not racist.
But guess what? Every racist term that exists, you can find some people who say it's not racist. It's going to be controversial. What I do think is interesting-- and I kind of want to ask you about this. And as you said, I dropped this on Saturday in the middle of a radio program that this was going to be coming, you know, within 24 to 48 hours.
Lo and behold, it comes within the 48-hour window. But what's interesting about this is I spoke to some NFL teams leading into that radio program that had been, essentially, let-- you know, there were people in the NFL's league office to let them know, hey, just so you know, something's coming. Be prepared to start taking care of the logo and the nickname for Washington.
The thinking being, well, there's going to be a name. There's got to be something that's coming with this. Instead, Washington is saying in the background-- people in the front office are saying in the background that, you know, there's these issues securing the next name and logo. OK. Well, here's the thing. There's a question of how long is the league going to let this drag on?
Like what's the timeline? are you going to go a whole 2020 season now with a hey, we're this. But we're, quote unquote, retiring it. But we're going to keep it for now. Like at what point does the league step in and go, all right, come on. Let's get a move on this. Otherwise, we're going to start pulling stuff off every single platform.
TEREZ PAYLOR: You know, there's definitely a push for them to speed this process up and have it wrapped up by the end of the month. But I was actually talking to a source in the building. Like, it's not that easy, per say. Like, you can say, OK. Do it. But there are some complicated measures in this.
For instance, like the name of the facility is fill-in-the-blank park. All their business cards have that on there. Like it's 2300 fill-in-the-blank Park Drive. They've got all this gear with this stuff on it. Like, it will be the job of jobs, like, eliminating this stuff within a month.
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