When the former NFL defensive back Adam Archuleta analyzes Washington Redskins games for CBS, he won’t hesitate to use the team’s nickname.
“I would probably call them the Washington Redskins,” Archuleta, a retired safety who played for four teams including the Redskins, told Breitbart Sports. “That’s the way I know them. I know them as the Washington Redskins.”
Archuleta gives color to Tom McCarthy’s play-by-play for this weekend’s Titans-Browns game. And as part of CBS’s team that carries AFC action, Archuleta’s chances for covering the Redskins remain few (CBS broadcasts their Week Three Thursday night game against the Giants). But he says he plans to call them by their nickname on the occasion of covering them.
This is a different approach than fellow CBS announcer Phil Simms, who told the Associated Press last summer that he would avoid saying the Redskins nickname. Simms told the AP, “My very first thought is it will be Washington the whole game.”
The Redskins consider building a new stadium in the nation’s capital, but the Obama Administration promised to block construction of the project, on the current RFK Stadium site, unless the team changed its nickname.
In other words, the Obama administration expresses willingness to do business with Iran, the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, but not the professional football team cheered in the nation’s capital.
Do chants of “Death to America” really offend less than “Hail to the Redskins”?
Another former Redskin, linebacker London Fletcher, also with CBS, recently told Breitbart Sports that the nickname served as a great source of “pride” to him during his playing days.
“I loved being a Washington Redskin,” Fletcher said. “I wore the Redskins helmet and emblem when I came out in the stadium for seven years. I would throw that helmet up in the air. For me, it was pride. I used to look at the Redskin the helmet and it was pride. It meant strength, honor, history, tradition.”
Redskins owner Daniel Snyder also uses the word “honor” when talking about the nickname.
“On that inaugural Redskins team (in 1933), four players and our Head Coach were Native Americans,” wrote Daniel Snyder in a letter to season-ticket holders in 2013. “The name was never a label. It was, and continues to be, a badge of honor.”
Snyder refuses to change the nickname under any circumstances. “We’ll never change the name,” Snyder told USA Today in 2013. “It’s that simple. NEVER — you can use caps.”
And Archuleta refuses to submit to a culture obsessed with “microagressions” and prone to feigning outrage.
“I understand people could be offended by [the nickname], but I also think in today’s society, every walk of life can find some way another to be offended with something,” Archuleta said. “I just chose not to go through life being offended.”
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