Washington Commanders

Washington Commanders, American professional gridiron football team based in Washington, D.C. The Commanders play in the National Football Conference (NFC) of the National Football League (NFL) and have won two NFL championships (1937 and 1942) and three Super Bowls (1983, 1988, and 1992).

Founded in 1932 as the Boston Braves, the team changed its name the following year and played three seasons as the Boston Redskins before relocating to Washington in 1937. The Redskins acquired one of their most famous players the same year, when they drafted groundbreaking quarterback Sammy Baugh with the sixth selection of the NFL draft. Baugh led the Redskins to a championship in his rookie season and set numerous NFL passing records over the course of his 16-year career. His second NFL championship with the Redskins came in 1942, as Washington defeated the Chicago Bears for the title two years after being humiliated in the championship game by the Bears 73–0.

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One of the wealthiest NFL franchises in its early days, the Redskins, under the guidance of their owner, Hall of Famer George Preston Marshall, used their significant means to pioneer the use of sports broadcast media. In 1944 they assembled a radio network to broadcast games throughout the southern United States, and by 1950 the entire Redskins season was televised. The team developed one of the most passionate fan bases in professional football; from 1967 through 2017 the team sold out every home game of every season, a record that ended with its first home game in 2018.

The rise of the Redskins as a media power coincided with the least successful period in team history: the Redskins posted just four winning records between 1946 and 1970, failing to advance to the playoffs in each season. Two notable players of this era were quarterback Sonny Jurgensen and wide receiver Bobby Mitchell, who starred for the Redskins in the 1960s and were inducted together into the Hall of Fame in 1983.

In 1971 Washington hired head coach George Allen, who promptly led the team to a postseason appearance in his first year at the helm. The team’s greatest success under Allen came in 1972: with a squad featuring wide receiver Charley Taylor on offense and linebacker Chris Hanburger on defense, the Redskins won their first NFC championship, only to lose the Super Bowl to the undefeated Miami Dolphins the following January.

In 1981 the team hired head coach Joe Gibbs, winner of more games than any other coach in Redskins’ history. Gibbs’s record includes eight playoff appearances and four NFC championships along with three Super Bowl victories (1983, 1988, 1992). A testament to Gibbs’s coaching ability—and to the overall quality of his teams—is the fact that each of the Redskins Super Bowl-winning teams was led by a different quarterback: Joe Theismann, Doug Williams, and Mark Rypien. Running back John Riggins, wide receiver Art Monk, and cornerback Darrell Green—all future Hall of Famers—starred for the Redskins during their Super Bowl-winning run, which was also famous for featuring rugged offensive lines known by the nickname “the Hogs.” Gibbs retired in 1993, and the team promptly posted three consecutive losing seasons.

In 1999 the Redskins, owned outright since 1985 by the flamboyant Jack Kent Cooke, were purchased by billionaire Daniel Snyder, whose first decade of ownership was marked by splashy free-agent acquisitions, as well as a four-year return to the sidelines by Gibbs beginning in 2004, but few winning seasons. Behind the standout play of rookie quarterback Robert Griffin III, the team posted a 10–6 record in 2012, but it lost its opening playoff game. Griffin was injured in that playoff loss, and he hobbled through a disastrous 2013 season that saw the team lose 13 games to post the worst record in the NFC. The ineffective Griffin was replaced by Kirk Cousins during the 2014 season, and the latter quarterback led the Redskins to a division title in 2015. That playoff appearance proved to be an outlier, as the team followed it with three consecutive third-place divisional finishes and then a dismal 3–13 finish in 2019.

The franchise’s nickname was the subject of much debate for decades—protesters believed that the term was a racial slur that was offensive to Native Americans, but supporters argued that the name reflected pride in the team’s heritage—that reached a head in 2014. In June of that year, the U.S. Patent Office canceled the team’s trademark of the name on the ground that the term was disparaging to Native Americans. The team appealed the decision, and Snyder vowed that he would not change the name. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the team’s appeal in October 2016 but instead heard a similar appeal that led to a Court ruling in June 2017 that struck down the U.S. government’s ban on offensive trademark registrations on First Amendment grounds.

However, in 2020, amid nation-wide protests for racial equality, the team announced that it was no longer going to be known as the Redskins. The club played as the Washington Football Team during the 2020 and 2021 seasons before adopting the name “Commanders” in 2022. That same year, investigations into alleged financial and other improprieties connected to Snyder and the team were underway, and a U.S. House of Representatives oversight committee released a report that described the organization’s workplace culture as “toxic.”

Snyder sold the team for more than $6 billion to a group of investors led by businessman Josh Harris before the start of the 2023 season. While the team had won its division in 2020, albeit with a losing record, its performance since 2019 had been lackluster. The Commanders finished 4–13 in 2023, and the new owners fired head coach Ron Rivera.