The 5 O’Clock Club: Good as Gold

It’s 5 o’clock somewhere…

The 5 o’clock club is published from time to time during the season, and aims to provide a forum for reader-driven discussion at a time of day when there isn’t much NFL news being published. Feel free to introduce topics that interest you in the comments below.

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We found out about the NFL’s approval that finalized agreement for the purchase of the Washington Commanders by Josh Harris and his limited partners on July 20th last year. With all that’s happened, it’s hard to believe that it hasn’t quite been a full 12 month yet.

I imagine it’s complicated to run the fan relations side of a professional sports team. As an ownership or management group, one is always dealing with a huge group of people with diverse interests and priorities who really have only one thing in common — passion for the team — and who may have very different ideas about the best way forward on nearly everything else.

Possibly the most poignant example of this that I can think of would be the name change experience suffered through by the Washington fan base — an experience that feels as if it hasn’t quite ended. Personally, I thought it was well past the time when the name should have been changed when it finally happened in 2020, though I thought the team mangled the process of moving away from “Redskins” and on to something new. That said, there are some people who insist they will go to their graves calling the team the Redskins. While most fans seem to be dissatisfied with the Commanders moniker, others in the fan base have embraced it fully, even as some others have taken the approach 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 get agreement among a diverse group of fans, and how easy it is to, in fact, divide the fan base with the wrong decisions or process.

The next really huge challenge will probably be the decisions that surround the location and financing of the new stadium — something that Josh Harris and his partners have to get right. No matter where the stadium ends up being built, some fans will be dissatisfied 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 whatever public funding is put into the deal.

In the meantime, there are a huge number of decisions, large and small, that Harris & Co. are navigating. One of the biggest — the decision to hire Adam Peters as the GM — was widely praised across the NFL landscape and seen as a ‘win’ by most fans. Myriad decisions, from personnel to stadium upgrades to traffic redirection after games to buying drinks for celebratory fans have been taken already by Harris and his partners in the year since the purchase of the team was finalized.

In general, I get the feeling that, if nothing else, the new-ish ownership group has been better at communicating what it’s doing to mend fences. As an example, let me call attention to the way Darrell Green’s jersey number retirement has been handled. First, in the early Spring, the team released a video of Green being tricked into announcing his own number retirement. More recently, around the time of minicamp, the team included the extended version of that video in the 3rd episode of Commanders Log, a video series that provides an all-access look at the first-ever offseason of the Washington Commanders. The date of the retirement of No. 28 hasn’t been announced yet, but because of the offseason communication effort, the fan base should be fully prepared for it, and can build it into their planning for the 2024 season when the date is eventually announced. This contrasts sharply with the 3- or 4-days’ notice that was given for the Sean Taylor No. 21 retirement, and the feeling at the time that it was almost an afterthought or a hastily thrown together PR effort (apparently, it had actually been planned well in advance, but the announcement and ceremony were simply poorly handled).

In discussing the reaction to last season’s NFLPA survey of players, which was negative about a number of the areas of Washington’s operations, Jeremy Reaves explained how the new owners addressed themselves to the players’ concerns with the cafeteria food offerings and other issues:

“It was very selective in what we were eating [before], obviously,” Reaves said. “And new ownership and new coaches came in, and they changed all of that stuff. They made an emphasis on that. When new ownership came in, they took the time personally to come talk to some of the leaders that’d been here for a while and asked us what we wanted to change and what we wanted different. And we are seeing it.”

This week, we are seeing another example of how the current leadership makes decisions and communicates them to its fan base. On Tuesday, the team went Twitter-heavy with a half-dozen or so posts announcing the return of the gold pants to the team’s uniform rotation in 2024, and supported that effort with a press release-style announcement on its official website.

The team, which made the announcement Tuesday on its 92nd anniversary, has not determined in which games it will sport gold pants.

The decision on pants color might be seen by some as the most trivial of issues for a sports team to consider; others, however, might place a lot of weight on it because of what it represents. Firstly, the decision to revive the gold pants might be seen as giving something back to fans that have lost so much of what they have loved and rooted for all their lives. Secondly, it tends to show that the owners and executives of the team are listening and are prepared to respond, doing what’s possible in the short term while the bigger, harder-to-accomplish items get sorted out.

Per the Washington Post:

According to the Gridiron Uniform Database, Washington is 130-114-3 in gold pants since 1969. But the Commanders’ new ownership group, led by Josh Harris, has made recognizing the history of the team a priority. Many former players, including John Riggins and Darrell Green, have returned in support of the franchise’s new era.

I see myself as an interested and invested part of the fan base, yet there are things that simply don’t matter to me because of my situation. For example, living in Bangkok as I do, the stadium experience, from parking to ticket prices and from food choices to beer prices simply don’t matter to me.

I can also say that gold pants don’t really move the needle in a positive direction for me (not something I care much about) but it does mean one or two games when I won’t be cringing at the pajama-like look of the burgundy jersey over un-striped burgundy pants that does move the needle in a negative direction for me. Once the game starts, any thought of uniforms flies right out of my head, but as someone who routinely has to decide on photos to post with stories, I’m aware of my preferences and how often I select or reject a photo because of which uniform combination the player is wearing. If you ever see one of my articles with a black uniform, for example, you’ll know that I either loved the picture despite the uniform, or I simply couldn’t find an alternative.

What I do care about and hope for is a resurgence of pride and a reunification of the Washington fan base around a team that we are all proud of. My memories of the team date back to the season that Vince Lombardi changed our helmet logo to a Green Bay Packer-ish “R” in circle (and well before that, to the days of the spear helmet). The passion of Redskins fans for the team under Lombardi, George Allen, Jack Pardee and Joe Gibbs was as fierce as that of the fans of any sports team anywhere. Returning to that level of passion happens via a series of steps, big and small, and will take some time and some luck. I get the feeling that this week’s announcement about the gold pants may be one small step in the right direction.