The Draw Play

The irony here being this comic took much more work than the usual version because I actually had to draw panels this time.

A week ago I posted the Nike Undo comic, and in the blog post I wrote this line:

“The Commanders are rumored to be getting a new look soon, and I would bet real money that they just go right back to the [REDACTED] scheme, just with the new logo.”

Sometimes I wish I actually was a betting man. Not that it was a hard bet. It would have been low odds. I’d have made like 5 dollars.

That’s it. They undid the Commanders re-design and took it back to the [REDACTED]. The only difference here is that they made yet another boring black alternate, which is where the one new idea went: the alt logo with the spear. I actually like it. It looks really nice on the helmet. I always liked the spear helmet better than the [REDACTED] helmet anyway. It’s perfectly fine for an alternate. The rest of the black alternate is just the away uniform but replace white with black. Snooze.

Again, I can’t be too upset, because the [REDACTED] had one of the best fits in the league prior to the brand change. It was the one thing I was sad we lost in that process. The Commanders rebrand was boring and the new uniforms a weak facsimile of the previous classics. Now it’s back and the team looks like it always should have. The only change we needed was the name and the logo.

Speaking of which, the spear alt and classic uniform returning has caused some unwarranted worry to bubble up about the team possibly hitting undo on the entire era and going back to [REDACTED]. I do not share this worry, to be honest.

Why? Because we already crossed the threshold and changed it. Getting the name changed was a decades long ordeal from the initial tiny protests to the wave of corporate pushback during the BLM movement that actually got human testicular torsion Dan Snyder to relent. Once the change is made, it’s hard to go back. We’ve had enough time to adjust to it. I’m not mentally calling them the [REDACTED] anymore, the switch in my brain has flipped over to naturally calling them the Commies.

The other important point here is I don’t see much demand for it. Sure, a small crowd of people want it, but most of the anti-woke crowd that was so loud about it when the name was in debate have moved on. Because they lost that fight, and it was ultimately a very minor fight over a team name, and now we’ve all adjusted to the new normal. Even if they still prefer the old name, I don’t see the passion in the movement anymore. It’s just a thing they’d be happy with. Nobody’s protesting Commanders, it’s just grumpy old fogies grumbling in bars and some facebook pages/online petitions.

And most importantly, I see no corporate desire to move back. Corporate pressure was what finally broke Snyder’s wall. They did that mostly due to cultural pressure. Corporations only care about money. Would changing the name back be fruitful? They don’t want to rock the boat and change the name back to the one that caused controversy in the first place. They already moved on to a safe, controversy-free name. Josh Harris isn’t Dan Snyder. He’s just a regular business ghoul. At most I see them introducing some throwback merch with the old branding to appease the small contingent of people who would want it. This way they get the best of both worlds: they can pander to the people who want it without actually changing anything.

Yes, Trump is a wildcard who might do any sort of stupid shit like try and force a name change because a rich friend told him to or he gets even more desperate for a positive image boost, so we always have to account for that, but I still just don’t see it happening. I think they are the Commanders now. The history might occasionally get glorified, but I don’t think the genie is going back in the lamp.

Special thank you to the two individuals who gave me this comic idea independently from different sources. I actually wasn’t going to make a comic for this at all because it was the same thing as last week, so the extra meta level on top of one of my already big ongoing meta jokes was excellent.

 

EDIT: So I finished this comic and then the Rams dropped another new uni. It’s not a full undo, it’s more of a cleanup of the current uniforms. It seems to have the same basic philosophy of removing all the experimental elements for basic stuff. They got rid of the stupid bone uniforms, the gradient on the numbers is out, and they adjusted the shoulder horns. It’s an upgrade, but mostly by subtraction.