Washington Commanders

The Washington Commanders are a franchise in the middle of the most thorough reinvention in NFL history — not just a new name, not just new ownership, but a wholesale attempt to build something worthy of a history that is simultaneously glorious and deeply complicated. For decades, this was one of professional football's flagship organizations, a team whose marching band could be heard from RFK Stadium to Capitol Hill, whose games were appointment viewing for presidents and senators and lobbyists who would never agree on anything except that Sunday afternoons belonged to football. That version of the franchise feels like ancient history now, separated from the present by years of dysfunction, scandal, and a name change that was both long overdue and painfully belated. But the bones of something great are still there, buried under the rubble, waiting to be excavated.

The franchise began in 1932 as the Boston Braves, became the Boston Redskins in 1933, and moved to Washington in 1937 under the ownership of George Preston Marshall, a laundry magnate and shameless showman who introduced the NFL to halftime entertainment, fight songs, and a flair for spectacle that the league would eventually adopt wholesale. The early decades produced championships in 1937 and 1942, with Sammy Baugh — the rail-thin Texan who could throw, punt, and play defensive back with equal brilliance — establishing himself as one of the sport's first true superstars. But Marshall's legacy is permanently stained by his refusal to integrate the team; Washington was the last NFL franchise to sign a Black player, not doing so until 1962, and only then because the federal government threatened to revoke the team's lease on the publicly funded D.C. Stadium.

The golden era arrived under Joe Gibbs, who coached three Super Bowl championships with three different quarterbacks — a feat of organizational excellence that has never been replicated. The 1982 team with Joe Theismann, the 1987 team with Doug Williams (the first Black quarterback to win a Super Bowl, in a performance that transcended football), and the 1991 team with Mark Rypien each played with a physical, resourceful style that reflected Gibbs's genius for maximizing whatever roster he was given. The Hogs — the massive, mauling offensive line that became the franchise's identity — were blue-collar heroes in a white-collar town. Those teams are the standard against which everything since has been measured, and nothing since has come close.

The Daniel Snyder era, stretching from 1999 to 2023, was a masterclass in organizational dysfunction — a quarter-century of coaching carousels, questionable personnel decisions, stadium neglect, and off-field scandals that culminated in a Congressional investigation and Snyder's forced sale of the team. The name change to Commanders in 2022, while necessary, felt like rearranging furniture in a burning building. But the sale to Josh Harris's ownership group in 2023 has injected genuine hope into a fanbase that had been running on fumes and muscle memory. The drafting of Jayden Daniels has given Washington its most exciting young quarterback since Robert Griffin III, but with a supporting cast and organizational structure that RGIII never had. The Commanders are building something, and for the first time in decades, the foundation feels solid enough to support it.