Channing Stribling Signs with Washington Commanders

This isn't the point of this post - Stribling getting a shot in the NFL is and I'm happy for him - but I have seen this Washington Post poll used a bunch of times to dismiss actual complaints and offensiveness of these various mascots and names, and so I wanted to push back.

The original Washington Post poll wasn't specifically about Native American respondent's views on mascots; they were parts of broader surveys the Post did that, when they had an NA respondent on the line, would be asked a couple of questions.  The 504 respondents were surveyed over something like 4 months of other surveys, so we're already getting into sampling and timing issues that weaken the overall findings.  Beyond that, some of the questions were then asked of even fewer respondents (340 were asked about general offensiveness), and again that's spread out over the same broad time range.  Plus, since these were all phone surveys you also need to account for the known bias of respondents to provide "more socially desirable responses" when speaking to someone on the phone.  And there have been contemporaneous studies showing that these mascots and names do lower self-respect amongst Native Americans, to say nothing of the numerous Native American organizations that have (and continue to) speak out about the use of offensive mascot names both at the professional and amateur levels.

But beyond all that, I don't know why it is so hard for people to just change a name.  Whether or not Cleveland or Washington "meant" to be offensive (and considering the views held by non-NA society at the times these names were first attached to those teams it's hard to claim they were positive), the fact that numerous groups of actual Native Americans petitioned to change the names sure seems to carry more weight than a handful of somewhat dubious surveys.  As noted above, there are voluminous examples of non-offensive names that could have been selected and yet people doggedly defended Daniel fucking Snyder's right to keep this dumb name seemingly because they didn't want to update their jersey collection.  Guardians and Commanders are uninspiring names, but blame that on well-compensated-but-uncreative consultants who, somewhat ironically, relied HEAVILY on public polls to identify the two "best" names for these sports teams.

Back when he was on ESPN, I remember Will Cain highlighting a study that showed the then-Washington Redskins were the most popular NFL team on American Indian reservations.

It's real, and it's spectacular