D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray says Redskins name change should be discussed

   The Redskins’ resurgence has District politicos once again talking about what it would take to relocate the team back inside the city limits. But Mayor Vincent C. Gray today suggested there would have to be a controversial prerequisite to any stadium deal: a name change, or at least discussion of one.

That was the message sent by D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray, following a press conference Wednesday. Gray said that the team, which lost to the Seattle Seahawks in the NFC wild-card game Sunday, must consider a name change if it is serious about moving from FedEx Field in Landover, Md., to a stadium inside D.C. proper, according to Yahoo! Sports.

“I think that if they get serious with the team coming back to Washington, there’s no doubt there’s going to have to be a discussion about that,” Gray said, according to the Washington Post. "I think it has become a lightning rod, and I would be love to be able to sit down with the team … and see if a change should be made. There’s a precedent for this, and I think there needs to be a dispassionate discussion about this, and do the right thing.”

For decades, the team name has been a controversial issue. Some call the "Redskins" moniker nothing short of a racial slur. Others argue that the team's name, which dates back to the 1930s, is tradition and does not need to be changed. In 1992, a quarter century after the name was formally trademarked, a group of Native Americans filed a disparagement lawsuit against the brand, reports the Christian Science Monitor. The suit was dismissed in 2009, when the Supreme Court declined to hear the case, but calls have continued for the team's current owner, Dan Snyder, to approve a name change.

In October, the D.C.'s alternative weekly, the Washington City Paper, announced it would no longer print the team's official name, which the publication said was a "pejorative term for Native Americans." After an online reader poll, the City Paper began referring to the team as the Washington Pigskins.

Snyder, however, remains unswayed.

If the pro football team were to change its name, the organization would join a growing list of sports teams that have already ditched the name. For example, The Monitor reports that between 1991 and 2008, 11 high schools and two colleges stopped using the name Redskins for their teams.

The mayor did not go so far as to call the Redskins name a “dealbreaker” but he did obliquely reference that the federal government, not the District, ultimately controls the land on which RFK Stadium now sits and on which a replacement football stadium would most likely be built.

Recall that the Redskins, under avowed racist owner George Preston Marshall, did not field a black player until 1962, after Interior Secretary Stewart Udall threatened to deny the team the use of what would later be named RFK Stadium unless it integrated.

Could a future federal official pull a Udall and threaten to keep the Redskins off federal land unless they changed their name? That would indeed be a dealbreaker.

In other Redskins-related comments, the mayor discussed Robert Griffin III’s knee maladies, which now threaten to keep him out of at least part of the next season. Gray put the blame on team doctors rather than Head Coach Mike Shanahan or Griffin himself.

“It probably raised the question of whether medical professionals should play a greater role in whether a player continues to play or not,” he said. “We’ve obviously done that with concussions, and maybe we need to do that with all the injuries. … A coach is not a medical professional, and I think they should defer to medical professionals in instances like this.”