Root for the team but love the laundry

Yahoo

4 days ago

Full disclosure: My wife is a diehard, lifelong fan of the Dallas Cowboys.
No one's perfect. Navigating life means learning to accept one's obvious flaws and, truth be told, that's a pretty big one.
Good thing she's got an amazing personality. It almost makes up for all that other stuff.
If you grew up in Santa Fe in the way-back times of the '70s, '80s and early '90s, it usually meant you were a fan of one of the following: Cowboys (gross), Broncos (meh), Steelers (sure, I guess), Rams (take it leave it) or 49ers (bandwagoners).
Very few people back in the day gave two sniffs about anyone else. There were some Bears fans, maybe a few Dolphins loyalists here and there. But the Washington Commanders née Redskins? Not many.
My origin story comes from the days when one of my neighbors was a classmate of Joe Theismann at Notre Dame. By then, Theismann was settling in as the full-time starter at QB in Washington and the neighbor was more a fan of him, not the team.
Being the impressionable young lad I was, it was the aesthetics that drew me in.
Simply put, I was (and am) a uniform nerd. Washington's color scheme and game-day look was so far removed from the Cowboys and Broncos that it felt retro cool to like a team that was just ... different.
The duds they adopted in 1979 stuck around for more than 30 years, and the general look remained in place for more than four decades. To appreciate that kind of consistency one must look no further than the almighty wise man, Jerry Seinfeld.
'Loyalty to any one sports team is pretty hard to justify because the players are always changing. The team could move to another city,' he once said. 'You're actually rooting for the clothes when you get right down to it, you know what I mean? You are standing and cheering and yelling for your clothes to beat the clothes from another city.'
Couldn't have said it better myself.
You revere the team but you absolutely love the laundry — unless you have a truly horrible look (yeah you, Titans, Seahawks and Falcons; fight me).
All this to say Wednesday was a great day for us Washington fans. For the first time since the calamitous 2022 rebrand that brought us the horrific beveled number fonts, boring designs and nightmarish black alternates, the Commanders (still not prepared to adopt that name yet) unveiled alternative uniforms for the upcoming season.
Wednesday's announcement came with little fanfare. ESPN didn't break into programming, The Athletic didn't release a photo spread and The Associated Press didn't explode with breaking news stories on the wire. Trust me, I looked.
The team's social media platform dropped teases in recent days, giving hope that maybe the team would bring back the beloved spear logo used for five seasons in the '60s, or some version of the one-off retro kit worn in 2003.
What we got was so much better. By stepping into the past and bringing back the classic unis worn during the peak years — the 'Super Bowl Era Threads' as the team calls them — it made the cringy and admittedly painful transition from Redskins to Washington Football Team to Commanders easier to take.
From the piping on the pants and the stripes on the socks to the yellow facemasks and collegiate block number fonts on the jerseys (minus the ridiculous beveled look), it felt like staring at the Mrs. on our wedding day all over again.
At long last, someone in Washington had the good sense to hold onto history without managing to offend anyone.
Go ahead and leave the old name behind. We get it; it's offensive and will never come back. Just leave us the laundry and allow us to once again love the clothes that defined a generation.
After last season's run to the NFC Championship and the potential of a return to D.C. at the site of the old RFK Stadium, getting our laundry back is a great step in the right direction.
Seinfeld was right all along.