Washington football team retires its name

UPDATE: The Washington football team have announced the name is retired.

The original post is below.

The NBA’s Washington Wizards and NFL’s Washington football team share a lot of things in common. They represent teams in the nation’s capital. They share many of the same fans. They have won championships in their leagues.

And now, they are both teams that have changed their names within the last 30 years.

The Washington Wizards were known as the Bullets since 1963 when they were in Baltimore before a move to the D.C. area in 1973. The Bullets changed their name to the Wizards in 1997, but the trigger moment sparking that change came from after then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated on Nov. 4, 1995. A few days later, then-owner Abe Pollin announced the team would no longer be the Bullets, and fans voted on several names.

The NFL team had been known as the “Redskins” since 1933 when they were still in Boston. Their name has been subject to growing controversy, because the term is considered by some to be a racial slur against Native Americans. With recent protests in D.C. and around the country around racial inequality, along with FedEx, the company that pays the team’s stadium naming rights, asking the team to change the name, I felt that the change was inevitable.

The team will announce this sometime in the morning on Monday, July 13. How do you feel about the name change?

And since the Wizards also had a name change not too long ago (depending on your age), how do you feel about two local teams changing their names? Let us know in the comments below and talk about it in this post, which can serve as your open thread.