Washington Redskins latest controversy is not what many football fans expect during a normal offseason.

Instead of a quarterback controversy or a coach on the hot seat, the Redskins organization is under fire from a national standpoint over the racist connotation behind the name Redskins.
This is just the latest controversy to hit the sports world after the National Basketball Association’s life long ban on LA Clippers owner Donald Sterling and the National Football League’s possible implementation of a potential game changing 15-yard penalty for the use of racial slurs on the field of play.

For a team that was once called the Boston Redskins, the only thing to change in the team’s existence is the name of the city they play for. Fifty senators have signed a petition urging the NFL and the Redskins owner Dan Snyder to change the name of his team. Snyder will not budge. The senators are using the recent Donald Sterling scandal as precedence in the Washington Redskins controversy. Many of the players and people in the Redskins organization feel the name should not be changed because they see it as an honorable name and nothing more. But if the NBA can ban one of its longest tenured owners for life, what course of action can the NFL take if Snyder continues to refuse?

However, the team, its owner and its fans see nothing racially discriminatory with the name and continue to stand by the team as the Washington Redskins because the name comes from historical origins. For a team that has only changed the name of its city from Boston to Washington and had only two logo changes in a 70-year period, changing the name would be both confusing and insulting to former players and other former people of the organization.

One can argue that if the Redskins were forced to change the name, then the American Constitution can be rendered invalid. Freedom of the press, speech and religion are some of the values America was built on. If the owner of the team likes his team’s name then he should not be forced into changing it because of a group of individuals. In certain context, anything can be taken as a racist comment. In the eyes of a city who has accepted the name for over fifty years, a name change now would be a step backward for not just the team and its players, but for the NFL overall. Also, if the Redskins name is forcefully changed, the NFL commissioner needs to reevaluate the league’s 31 remaining teams as a uniform decision.

Changing the name of a team would be a monetary disaster, not to mention what it would do to the history of the organization. An alternative could be changing the team’s logo, which is something the New England Patriots did following last season’s Aaron Hernandez scandal, but it was something that was team implemented. There should be nothing worth changing in Washington, because historical events know no race.