A smart NFL team owner would, of course, have gotten ahead of this years ago, but obviously the Washington NFL team does not have a particularly smart owner, at least not when it comes to football. Oh, and Washington NFL team owner Dan Snyder also isn’t particularly smart about sensing the winds of change coming…and taking action, ahead of time, instead of waiting for…this.
Legacies are on the line, and Fred Smith knows it.
The founder of FedEx owns a minority piece of the Washington team, along with Robert Rothman and Dwight Schar. Thus, the jarring, 16-word statement from FedEx regarding its request that the team change its name becomes much more than a perfunctory public comment from a sponsor feeling the heat from 87 investment firms holding $620 billion in assets. Smith, through his company, has publicly broken ranks with his partner, Daniel Snyder, calling him out to make the change.
At a time when Snyder’s 31 partners who own other NFL teams haven’t said a word about the issue, Smith has taken a stand…
So yeah, it really wasn’t smart for Snyder – or the NFL, for that matter – to let it come to this, and you’d think that maybe Snyder might have taken hints, like a few days ago when the National Congress of American Indians president said that R**skins’ players should “rip down that name like it was a statue of a Confederate general in their locker room.” On the other hand…Dan Snyder is the same guy who Rolling Stone named THE worst owner in sports, so there’s that. LOL.
Anyway, it’s hard to see how Snyder won’t be forced to finally, at long last, change the name now. Not because it’s the morally right thing to do, of course, but because of $$$. On that note, see below for the tweet about Nike removing all R**skins merchandise from its website, while “a group of 87 investment firms and shareholds have asked Nike, FedEx and PepsiCo to end their business relationships” with the Washington NFL team unless it finally changes its name. To mix sports metaphors…game, set, match?
P.S. It goes without saying that, here in Virginia, it’s long past time to ditch the appalling, embarrassing R**skins’ “Pride Caucus.” What on earth were Sen. Chap Petersen, etc. even *thinking* to set that up in the first place?!?
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