The 5 O’Clock Club: Good as Gold

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We learned of the NFL’s approval of the deal to purchase the Washington Commanders by Josh Harris and his limited partners on July 20th of last year. Given everything that has happened, it’s hard to believe that less than a year has passed.

I can imagine that managing fan relations for a professional sports team is complicated. As an ownership or management group, you are always dealing with a large group of people with different interests and priorities who really only have one thing in common – a passion for the team – and who can have very different ideas about how best to proceed on almost everything else.

Perhaps the most poignant example of this that comes to mind is the Washington fan base’s experience with the name change—an experience that feels like it’s not quite over yet. Personally, I thought it was long past time to change the name when it finally happened in 2020, even though I thought the team botched the process of moving away from “Redskins” and moving on to something new. Still, there are some people who insist they’ll refer to the team as the Redskins until they die. While most fans seem unhappy with the Commanders nickname, others in the fan base have fully embraced it, even if some take the stance that the name won’t matter to anyone if the team is winning championships. I bring this up not to reopen unhealed wounds, but as a reminder of how difficult it can be to reach agreement among a diverse group of fans, and how easy it actually is to divide the fan base with the wrong decisions or processes.

The next really big challenge will probably be the decisions about the location and financing of the new stadium – something that Josh Harris and his partners have to do it right. No matter where the stadium is ultimately built, some fans will be unhappy with the decision, and unless Harris and his partners pay for the design and construction entirely out of their own pockets, there will be people who will be unhappy with the public money going into the project.

In the meantime, Harris & Co. have a multitude of decisions to make, big and small. One of the biggest – the decision to hire Adam Peters as GM – was widely praised across the NFL landscape and considered a “win” by most fans. Countless decisions, from personnel to stadium improvements to rerouting traffic after games and buying drinks for partying fans, have already been made by Harris and his partners in the year since they finally took over the team.

In general, I feel that the relatively new ownership group has at least done a better job of communicating what they are doing to smooth things over. One example is the way Darrell Green’s jersey number retirement was handled. First, the team released a video in the spring that tricked Green into announcing his own number retirement. More recently, around the time of minicamp, the team released the extended version of that video in episode 3 of Commander’s Loga video series that offers a comprehensive look at the Washington Commanders’ first-ever offseason. The date for No. 28’s retirement has not yet been announced, but based on the offseason communication efforts, the fan base should be fully prepared and able to factor it into their planning for the 2024 season when the date is finally announced. This is in stark contrast to the 3 or 4 day notice period given for No. 21 Sean Taylor’s retirement and the feeling at the time that it was almost an afterthought or hastily cobbled-together PR exercise (apparently it was actually planned long in advance, but the announcement and ceremony were simply poorly handled).

In discussing the response to last season’s NFLPA survey of players, which was negative on a number of areas of Washington’s operations, Jeremy Reaves explained how the new owners responded to players’ concerns about food options in the cafeteria and other issues:

“We were obviously very picky about what we ate (before),” Reaves said. “And then new owners came in and new trainers came in, and they changed all that. They put a lot of emphasis on it. When the new owners came in, they personally took the time to talk to some of the executives who had been here longer and asked us what we wanted to change and what we wanted to do differently. And we see it.”

This week, we see another example of current leadership making decisions and communicating them to their fan base. On Tuesday, the team posted about a half-dozen posts on Twitter announcing the return of the gold pants to the team’s uniform rotation in 2024, and backed up the effort with a press release-style announcement on its official website.

The team, which announced this on Tuesday to mark its 92nd anniversary, has not yet decided which games it will wear gold pants in.

The pants color decision is considered by some to be the most trivial of all the issues a sports team has to consider; however, others place a lot of importance on it because of what it represents. First, the decision to bring back the gold pants could be seen as a way of giving back to the fans who have lost so much of what they have loved and cheered for their entire lives. Second, it shows that the team’s owners and executives are listening and willing to respond and do what is possible in the short term while the bigger, harder to achieve things are sorted out.

According to the Washington Post:

According to the Gridiron Uniform Database, Washington has a 130-114-3 record in gold pants since 1969. But the Commanders’ new ownership group, led by Josh Harris, has made it a priority to recognize the team’s history, with many former players, including John Riggins and Darrell Green, returning to help support the franchise’s new era.

I consider myself an interested and engaged part of the fan base, but there are things I simply don’t care about because of my situation. For example, living in Bangkok, I simply don’t care about the stadium experience, from parking to ticket prices and from food choices to beer prices.

I can also say that gold pants don’t really do anything positive for me (which I don’t particularly care about), but it does mean a game or two where I won’t shy away from the pajama-like look of the burgundy jersey over burgundy pants with no stripes, which does do something negative for me. Once the game starts, any thought of uniforms evaporates from my mind, but as someone who regularly has to decide what photos to post in their stories, I’m aware of my preferences and how often I choose or reject a photo based on the uniform combination the player is wearing. For example, if you ever see one of my articles with a black uniform, you know that I either liked the image despite the uniform or I just couldn’t find an alternative.

What is important to me and what I want to see is a resurgence of pride and a reunification of the Washington fan base around a team we are all proud of. My memories of the team go back to the season when Vince Lombardi changed our helmet logo to a Green Bay Packers-style “R” in a circle (and long before that, to the days of the spear helmet). The passion Redskins fans had for the team under Lombardi, George Allen, Jack Pardee and Joe Gibbs was as great as fans of any other sports team. Getting back to that level of passion will require a series of steps, big and small, and it will take some time and some luck. I feel like this week’s announcement about the gold pants might be a small step in the right direction.