Training Camp

Training Camp looms. Rookies are here. People say Redskins nickname coming back.

John Keim Report

It’s time to bring back Washington Redskins

Street Scores 

Ed Oliver 

Al Galdi 

Rick said no body changes their mind on Trump. I did. You don't protect children from sexual predators. You lose my support. Permanently.

Love Rick. Don't love Trump. Even though I voted for him. Three times. 

If his moral compass doesn't know jack about child predators, it ain't gonna know jack about NFL Nickname Controversies.  

The End of an Era But Obligatory Losing Still Entrenched

It is over for the 2023 Washington Franchise. With so much up in the air, there just is no stable footing for the players.

People talking about leaving. No one knows who the coaches will be. The ETA on winning has been postponed for God knows how long. Some say the team nickname will change again.

They were closer to winning at the start of this year. Now, with an anticipated roster purge, how much of the "core group of guys" will be left? If your leaders are talking about leaving where are your leaders going to come from? 

They are now farther away from winning. If only for the probability they will be asking a boatload of first-timers to play like seasoned veterans next year and maybe beyond.

The New Coach will have some recruiting to do. If he or she can't convince Payne, Allen, and McLaurin to stick around, that'll probably mean winning will be out of the question in 2024.

If the New Coach has a roster of system guys, vets who have played the incoming schemes, to do some leading and player coaching, and Sam Howell is kept, maybe they surprise people.

Joe Gibbs had a core group leftover from Jack Pardee. He had Theismann and Riggins and Butz. He had George Starke, Doc Walker, Neal Olkewicz, and Monte Coleman. Young Art Monk was a rookie on the 1980 team. Gibbs kept a few coaches.

The team has needs pretty much everywhere on defense and on the offensive line. That list of needs could expand if players who don't want to stick around for more obligatory losing are granted their wishes to seek deals elsewhere.

It's a shame. It really is a no-win scenario. It will take a great amount of skill at Lego to put a winning team together in time to keep the old Redskin fan base. I think that's a losing proposition, if you pardon the pun. 

It makes sense to try to start from scratch with a new fan base.

And that's what it looks like. They will be building a new fan base AND a new franchise. That's why I'm not ruling out the owners moving the team. The Prime NFL Viewing Age Group in Washington knows nothing but habitual losing. Somewhere fresh does not have that mental handicap.

For that, a good model would be the Carolina Panthers 1995 expansion team.

They were truly starting from scratch.

The Panthers stole a bit from George Allen's script. That 95 team brought in some wiley veterans. They went 7-9 their first year and 12-4 the next. 

Maybe something similar can happen with this Washington Franchise.

The Washington Burgundy and Gold

The team Nickname is coming up again. 

I was a Redskin fan since 1969. I started as a kid. Socialized to accept the nickname.

The Nickname though means something different to some Native Americans than it does to D.C. Football fans. We are not living in an age of free speech. Authoritarians are in charge of our country and our universities. The outrage they will post should Washington revert to the Redskin nickname would be an unnecessary distraction and a valueless political mess serving no one.

I don't mean to become an apologist for the nickname. But the word Redskin seems to have emerged in the minds of white conquistadors who were irritated by Native American resistance to White Land Use improvements. A Redskin in that light was an insurrectionist. It was good to be an insurrectionist working to retard White conquest.

The same dynamic occurs in the N-Word. White mental retardation was irritated by Black Resistance to slavery so it fulminated the N-Word. Once it emanated from mule-faced anglo saxons, Black Americans took pride in the fact they were irritating the oppressors. The N-Word used among Blacks was a celebration of the essential fact that they were existentially free and the N-Word in the mouth of a white man was an unconditional surrender to that truth. 

This is why some Native Americans are not bothered by the nickname and why the N-Word can be heard among some Black Americans.

Basing your identity on your capacity to irritate others is not universally effective because not everyone is an oppressor. Nor are insults concretized incantations that wound like boulders. Insults are a form of mental weakness. In football, as in life, it is good to be mentally tough. It is better not to speak at all if all you have to say is an insult. It is not that you aren't achieving your goal of destabilizing the person whose existence you reject. Maybe you are. But you are nakedly confessing that you are stupid and weak.

But shutting you up is your job not anyone else's. Why free speech works is it allows people to say stupid things and thereby organize themselves out of the loop. At the same time it allows for the intrusion of truth and the possibility for its acceptance. You should always allow the idiot to put his idiocy on full display and the genius to warn of the oncoming train. The idiot and the genius are intertwined. 

In the present environment, everyone is an oppressor. Ignorance is universally stipulated. Language must be politically correct. Inoffensive. Overly polite to works of fiction or fantasy realities. This is why science is in deep trouble. Facts are too oppressive to be admitted. A bodyguard of lies is necessary. It is like giving yourself a lobotomy. And apparently in this age of Authoritarian Rule one is morally obligated to stupidify oneself into a complete brain fog.

The Redskin Players and Coaches were not on the whole blazing racists and Klan Rally attendees. They weren't perfect. But they had moments of social relevance and sublime moments of competitive football. The history of those moments is worth preserving. And if Authoritarian Rule disallows the use of the word "Redskin", it ought to allow an inoffensive alternative which at the same time calls to mind the rich football history of the Washington Franchise.

That nickname to me, as well as to others, is "Burgundy and Gold". It's not my invention. The players used it themselves. It was a matter of pride to put on those colors. If you wore those colors in the Seventies, Eighties, and Nineties, you were part of something special. Three decades of it.

Not a wave of racist animosity. But years of good football. 

That is what we want to get back to in Washington. A Washington football-related nickname is my preference.