Washington Football Team to Announce New Team Name and Logo

The Washington Football Team, the NFL team formerly known as The Washington Redskins, has announced that they will reveal the official new team name next month on Feb. 2 along with a new logo.

The NFL team had retired the offensive Redskins moniker in 2020 due to pressure from various groups protesting the use of the name for years. With the logo bearing the red face of a Native American for years, several Indian groups and allies said the original name and logo were stereotypical.

The organization entered the NFL as the “Redskins” in 1933. Former owner George Preston Marshall moved the team from Boston to Washington, D.C. in 1937.

Last year on July 2, the team dropped the name because a group of 87 investment firms and shareholders signed three separate letters to sponsors Nike, FedEx, and PepsiCo that threatened to terminate relationships with the team unless it dropped the racially insensitive name. After receiving the letters, FedEx, the company with naming rights to the team’s stadium, formally asked the franchise to take action. From there, the team was temporarily renamed The Washington Football Team.

Jason Wright, the team’s president, has confirmed what the name won’t be as rumors began circulating that the team was contemplating using Wolves or RedWolves.

“First, and I’ll cut to the chase here, we can confirm that, after careful consideration, our team name will not be Wolves or RedWolves. One of the most awesome and powerful aspects of this process has been getting to hear and understand your preferences directly, and we know that many of you loved one or both of these names. And because of that, we want to share some context behind our decision not to move forward with these names. You all deserve nothing less.

“Early on, we understood Wolves — or some variation of it — was one of our fan favorites. As I’ve said all along, we take feedback from our fans seriously, and because of your interest in this name, we put Wolves on a list of options to explore fully. Once we began looking into Wolves, however, we became aware of a notable challenge: trademarks held by other teams would limit our ability to make the name our own. And without Wolves, variations like RedWolves wouldn’t have been viable either for these and other reasons.”