Washington Football Team name change: Twitter user may have found club's new moniker before Feb. 2 reveal

Fri, Jan 28, 2022
NFL News (AP)

The Washington Football Team has spent two full seasons looking for a new identity to carry into the future. On Feb. 2, that future will finally arrive as the team finally unveils its new name, but that still hasn't prevented a mad online dash to try and figure out just what the name is before it is officially revealed.

In a Twitter post on Wednesday, user Larry Legend believed he had discovered the new name of the team, noting that the domain name "Commanders.com" had been transferred from Namecheap to MarkMonitor -- the same company used by the NFL for all of their online domains. The transfer occurred at 7:34 p.m. ET that day.

While the user took that transaction as confirmation that the new team name would be the Washington Commanders, it wasn't quite the case. Sam Fortier of the Washington Post pointed out that not all NFL teams use MarkMonitor, with the Washington Football Team itself actually using GoDaddy for its domain.

Fortier noted that such claims of team name confirmation could be vetted through an examination of IP addresses, as the league's official website and 31 of its 32 teams refer to the same four addresses.

Real quick: NFL doesn't use MarkMonitor for all sites. Several team urls -- including Patriots, Ravens and, uh, https://t.co/zauPG4S4JG -- list other registrars. Look it up: https://t.co/esdqba4hVb.

New name could still be Commanders, but saying MM "= confirmed" is p reckless. https://t.co/BF81dGOhGr
- Sam Fortier (@Sam4TR) January 27, 2022

In a report by Michael Phillips of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, it was noted that the Commanders.com domain name had previously been owned by a member of the "Commanders Club," a group paying homage to the James Bond film series. The owner of the site confirmed he had sold the domain name, but had done so through an online brokerage and had no contact with the Washington Football Team in doing so.

While the Washington Commanders becoming the new team name is certainly possible, there is also the chance that this is another red herring. Washington retired the Redskins name in June of 2020, becoming the first NFL team to fully rebrand since the (previously Houston) Tennessee Oilers were rebranded as the Tennessee Titans upon their move to Nashville in the late 1990s.