The trademark issue has been covered, so hopefully you get an idea of how little that ruling actually impacted anything. But to your first point I'd ask you a question: which group of fans do you think would be bigger?:
- group A that is so outraged by the name change that they refuse to buy a new Pigskins (or whatever) jersey, drop their season tickets and adopt a new team.
- or group B that doesn't really care all that much because they realize it's still their team and they want the new gear because it's the NEW gear; plus the new season ticket holders that replaced the outraged in group A; plus people out of market that might support the positive move by buying some gear.
We may disagree but I'm pretty sure it's not group A. Part if that may be because I think the whole "fans will be pissed that we are abandoning our history" argument is complete bullshit. I think this for multiple reasons such as:
- DC is an extremely politically aware (obviously) market and one of, if not the most, culturally diverse city outside of NY. I tend to think that if you went further than doing an online ESPN poll and did a true Gallop poll in the streets, you would find a lot of support for dropping a racially insensitive mascot, especially given the mix of races and cultures present.
- once Snyder finally caves, he will have to admit why and placate to those he disagrees with or else he looks like an idiot for just doing it to shut people up. So now you have the owner of the goddamn team admitting it's a slur - how many people are going to risk being looked at as the bigot to refuse to buy the new hat or shirt or to walk away from season tix?
But even if you want to give no credit to those two - and that's certainly fair, they're simply my opinion - anyone who's lived in DC and been sports conscious will tell you there's absolutely no chance any kind of significant number of people walk away from this team.
It's tough to describe, but over the 15 years I lived here, I learned the ONLY team that actually has loyal fans is the Redskins. It's an extremely transient city and area, where a minority of people are actually from there and so the teams are followed by band wagoners and people looking to show off. When the Caps got good a handful of years ago, you saw red sweaters everywhere. When the Wiz got Jordan, all of a sudden It was the ticket to have. When the Nats came to town or when they got good a cpl years ago, you started to hear some buzz. I can tell you that i spent most of late 2004 and early 2005 in a perpetual state of pissed off because after the sox won, all of a sudden you saw sox hats everywhere.
But it's Redskins always. Obnoxiously so. It is the only team anyone is loyal to there. There was nothing I loved more than when they were bad and luckily that was often. Because then people would shut the fuck up about them. But part of me still respected them no matter how annoying it was to hear "we're 2-6, but if we go 8-0 we can take the division!" Every. Year.
Let me be very clear when I assure you that Snyder isn't balking at this move because of money. If you don't agree with my rationale, that's fine, I'm sure an argument can be made that they would in fact lose money somehow. I wouldn't buy it, but sure, you can make a case for anything. Hes not making this move because he's a smug little ass hole who will not be told what to do with his toy. It's no different than the first decade of his ownership where he blatantly made things worse by insisting on having control of player personnel because he was the boss and was too fucking egotistic to realize he was the problem.
I don't know what happened that finally made him step back from having his hands in everything, but whatever it was, it will take the equivalent of that to get him to back down on this topic. I don't know what that fucked up conversation scale looks like, but I assure you no amount of public pressure will get it done and the fan base will not make a big enough stand against to force it.
He either needs some kind of crazy offer from the district to drop it - like the old proposed "build a new stadium on site of old rfk and we'll give you a hundred lease on the land for $1" or he needs everyone to stop talking about it so he can make it look like his own idea. But that's just mho.
