Well a lot of that is because cities don’t necessarily encompass the fanbase. I’ve already mentioned Carolina. Minnesota is because Minneapolis and St. Paul are very much linked (hence the baseball team being called the Twins) and therefore trying to name the team for one city or the other kind of messes up the point. New England was named Boston, but then they moved like an hour outside of Boston, so using the name of the city would be pretty silly. I don’t know the history of Arizona teams (though the Cardinals have moved around to many different cities, roughly around the Phoenix metro area, but Tempe and Glendale are both top 10 Arizona cities by population).
See: Utah Jazz (moved from New Orleans in 1979)
They had the same issue when they launched the Buccaneers franchise – it was supposed to appeal to a fanbase in Tampa, St. Pete and other, smaller towns, so they named it after the body of water where the cities are located. (And they didn’t want to use “Florida” because the Dolphins were already well-established in Miami.) One unforeseen consequence is that most Americans now think there’s a city called “Tampa Bay.”
Yes, Texas Rangers are the same way. They play in Arlington, but want to be the team of Dallas and Ft. Worth. Amusingly the two incarnations of the Washington Senators moved and adopted state team names (Minnesota Twins and Texas Rangers).
And the NBA’s Warriors changed their name from San Francisco to Golden State once they started playing most of their games in Oakland.
What about the Jets and the Giants? They moved to a different state, but still use the New York moniker.
It likely doesn’t help that the Bucs, being the first pro team to use “Tampa Bay,” are in the same league as the Green Bay Packers – and Green Bay is a city, as well as being a body of water.
That’s because they had a scheme to play “home” games in both San Diego and Oakland. They played a few home games in San Diego the first year as Golden State and then abandoned the idea.
They did, but they are still in the New York City metro area. As far as I know, there’s no hard-and-fast rule in the various sports leagues about geographic naming, and as noted above, when teams use something other than a city name, it’s usually in an effort to suggest that they “represent” a larger geographic area.
That was my point - the Pats didn’t change their name out of some sense of geographic accuracy, they did it to attract fans. It wouldn’t have been silly to have continued to call them the Boston Patriots, since it’s not silly that the Giants & Jets remained NY teams.
They are about 15 mins from the City (even with traffic). And they are free to use the City’s name if they want. The Patriots could have kept Boston, but they thought it would have been silly (tried to use Bay State Patriots first, actually, before the NFL nixed that idea).
They already were the team of New England. It’s not like the Boston Red Sox don’t get fans up in Vermont and Maine because they are named for Boston after all.
The DC Superheroes
The DC Universe
The DC Supermen
The DC Comics
I’m not sure that’s a great idea.
The most recent bill to make DC a state would change the name to “Douglass Commonwealth”, so DC would still work.
That’s the case for every single sports team ever, so that’s a terrible argument. I don’t actually live in Seattle (never have) but I have been a fan (to varying degrees) of every single Seattle professional sports team. Am I not allowed? The Seahawks have fans in Oregon, Idaho, Alaska, and so on. Should they be the Pacific Northwest Seahawks? Of course not, that’s stupid, just as the “New England Patriots” is stupid.
I don’t mind when a team is named after the nearest major city. Neither New York team plays in New York City (though they’re very close to it), San Francisco plays in Santa Clara, etc. Even the team this thread is about plays in Maryland, not Washington, DC. And that doesn’t bother me, I figure, “close enough”. Foxborough (where the Patriots play) is only a half hour out of Boston according to Google, and it’s a suburb of that city, so it seems sensible to name them the Boston Patriots.
Also, the Titans play in Nashville. Why aren’t they the Nashville Titans? The whole thing is ridiculous.
Why is it a terrible argument if, say, a team feels more like a Carolinas team than a Charlotte team? Certain teams very much try to embody the city they are closest to and certain teams don’t. The New England Patriots feels more like a New England team - Hell they are located closer to Providence, Rhode Island than they are to Boston.
That one is easy. West, Central, and East Tennessee basically act like they are different states. The Titans organization wanted to appeal to the University of Tennessee fans from Knoxville and knew naming the team Nashville would sour folks on it.
I don’t even know what that means. How can a team “feel” like one thing or another? That seems like nonsense.
How do you “embody” a city?
I’m not trying to be a sealion. Your answers literally make no sense to me, as someone who has been a fan of professional football for more than 40 years. I literally don’t understand the arguments.
Why isn’t “America’s Team” (Dallas) just called the “United States Cowboys” if what you’re arguing has any basis in fact? Because I don’t think your arguments do have any basis in fact. I am pretty certain that this is just the NFL being arbitrary, and handling each team individually and inconsistently, trying to appease certain people in each case and ending up with a mess.
What’s the mess, though? Is anyone honestly confused by the fact that the New York Jets and Giants play their home games in New Jersey? Do people think the football team in Minnesota is comprised of actual Vikings? Maybe it’s the term “home field”. They don’t actually live in the stadium like those Baker Mayfield commercials, you know.
I’m with you. It seems like a post-hoc justification for decisions that were arbitrary.
Take your example of the Dallas Cowboys. They had been a minor league “Dallas Rangers” baseball team that was on the verge of folding, so the nascent NFL team was going to take the name. The baseball team survived, however, and so the NFL team went with the Cowboys instead. The baseball team eventually moved and folded and the current Texas Rangers came in from out of state.
And they’re pretty much the default team for the region, extending into nearly all of Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Texas, and parts of New Mexico, Kansas and a few other states. To the extent they embody a region, it’s Texas more than Dallas in particular and it’s a stretch to claim they embody the city more than the region.
I just can’t see it as a big deal. The Boston Patriots didn’t feel as if they were embodying Boston by moving out closer to Providence, so they took on New England after getting Bay Street nixed.
The Panthers wanted to be the team of North AND South Carolina. The Titans wanted to be the team of Tennessee. Minnesota teams (note, none of the Vikings, Twins, Wild, Timberwolves or United FC are named either Minneapolis or St. Paul, but rather Minnesota) want to encompass the Twin Cities.
What’s the argument that they should be forced to adopt the name of cities when they want their identity to encompass a wider area? And this is decidedly not an NFL argument alone.
Exactly. I just can’t see why it matters that there exists the Minnesota Vikings or Carolina Panthers in the same league with the New York Giants.
The Washington Filibusters?