I’m not a big X-Men fan, but the first thing I thought of when I heard Sentinels were the huge flying mutant-hunting robots from one of the X-Men movies. These robots. I can’t imagine Marvel’s intellectual-property antennae wouldn’t start twitching madly if an NFL team went with Sentinels.
I’d like to see them make a clean break from the past. They can’t choose “red” anything…that would be like saying, “We were wrong…but we want to carry over our brand” or something.
And in fact, I think it would be great if they became the DC something. Lose the confusion with Washington state.
I think any reference to politics is a losing name. I can think of some senators I’d love to see laid out on the field. And given the status of concussion injuries, I think they would be better served by getting away from overt references to violence. Also, warfare—we’re a violent country, according to most of the world.
I like team names that aren’t plurals. E.g the Chicago Fire, the Alabama Crimson Tide…and plurals without the s, like the Fighting Irish (which I guess is scrutinized now as well). Something about the “s” of most team names makes it seem “me too.” These pirates—they’re all pirates? Hey, there’s a separate beef; pirates sound romantic or something until they want to board your cruise ship and then why the hell are we glorifying them?!
So I’d hope for something like “The DC Thunder.”
Hopefully I’ll remember to watch the Super Bowl this year. I understand Cincinnati has a shot at it, and while I’ve never been to the place, I like to root for the one that has never won a championship. Plus, WKRP.
By the way we bought some Aunt Jemima Pearl Milling Company syrup the other day. Same colors, font on the bottle…and same great taste. So the Washington team can keep their colors.
Hail to the Commies!
If they went with a logo that looked like the robots, and/or referenced the X-Men in some way, I could see an issue.
Otherwise Marvel has zero claim on a very common word in the English language.
I don’t recall them suing the Carolina team for infringing on the Black Panther…
Better dead than red!
Any names should first be submitted to a committee of late night tv joke writers to test for unforeseen nicknames and mockery possibilities. For instance, I can see “The Washington Monuments” being called “The Big Stiffs” two seconds after the name is announced.
There’s probably no way around that; as anyone who attended grade school knows, people intent on sophomoric humor will always find a way to make fun of your name.
Here’s a pretty good breakdown of all the leaks showing it to be Commanders:
I’m sorry. I hate this idea. The city is called Washington. The metro area is the Washington area. When someone from far away asks me where I live I say Washington. I say “D.C.” only if I’m physically within the formal political boundaries of the District of Columbia. The teams should be named Washington. The “confusion” is no more than is usual with many place names.
I completely agree with this.
I have the opposite opinion. I like traditional nicknames—colors, things, animals, colored animals, other colored things. I don’t like mass nouns or abstract concepts. As they said in “The Commitments,” all the good bands were the somethings.
My niece lives in Charlotte, North Carolina. She wonders why they’re not the North Carolina Panthers. My WAG is they chose to appeal to a broader area, try to attract more fans. But if your opinion is typical of people there, I’ll defer to it.
One of many of Delta State University’s “Fighting Okra” videos.
I’m not sure I follow… The formal political boundaries of the District of Columbia are identical to the formal political boundaries of the city of Washington. You can, of course, refer to the whole metropolitan area as “the Washington area”, but you can equally well refer to it as “the DC area”.
You could, but I don’t. That’s my preference. We are talking about preferences, right?
I read your post as trying to assert the normal nomenclature for the area, but if you’re just expressing your personal rhetoric I get it.
As a resident of the big Washington, my preference is the opposite of yours. 
Oh, so you’re trying to claim some sort of exclusive dominion over the name “Washington”? I see, well, asserting that it creates some kind of level of confusion that must be dispelled isn’t very convincing.
If it did require a solution, my preferred one would be to require all team names to be based on cities, and eliminate state and regional names.
DC is far less ambiguous than Washington. I usually refer to where I’m from as “Washington State”, because I prefer to avoid ambiguity.
The fact is that neither location has exclusive dominion. Fortunately we already have more specific names than just “Washington”.
I really don’t understand why we don’t already. Arizona, Minnesota, Carolina, New England, those are just awful to me.
The problem with that is teams move. Our LA Lakers are only near a man-made, concrete river since they moved from the land of 10K lakes.
The Lakers probably should have renamed themselves when they moved, like the Sonics did. It’s silly when teams have a nickname that is strongly tied to a geographical area then move to a new area and keep the old name when it no longer makes any sense.
The orderly part of my brain really wants them to do away with Washington and go with DC. But one potential pitfall to that is the risk that the District will eventually become a full-fledged state sometime in the not-too-distant future. I suspect that if that happens the designation as a “district” could change.
Of course the rest of the local teams use Washington and more often than not when people want to refer to the US Capital they call it Washington. Though pretty much everyone I know who has cause to travel there for work or pleasure almost exclusively calls it “DC”. Washington is the idea, DC is the place…or at least that’s how I reconcile it.
It’s not really a WAG. I think they have been open that they want to be the team of North and South Carolina, esp since there are Charlotte suburbs in South Carolina.