Controversy Surrounds Washington Commanders Head Coach Dan Quinn’s Bootleg T-Shirt at Online Stores

Dan Quinn, the new head coach of the Washington Commanders, donned a t-shirt on Sunday that brought back the memories of mascots of old – and not in a good way.

The Commanders had long been known as the Washington Redskins – and their logo featured the head of an Indigenous person inside a circle with two feathers hanging off the side of it.

So when Quinn donned a graphic t-shirt that meshed the team’s current ‘W’ logo with those two feathers, he attracted controversy.

The team told NBC Sports yesterday that they had ‘no organizational comment’ – with the outlet also reporting that ‘Quinn wore the T-shirt on his own, without the team knowing he’d be doing it.’

But beyond the clear racial controversy, it also brings up issues of copyright infringement – as the shirt is not officially licensed by the NFL.

The feathers on the bootleg shirt’s ‘W’ is a callback to when the team was called the Redskins

With Quinn stepping into the debate and wearing ‘bootleg’ merchandise, it’s important to remember why it’s controversial in the first place.

The team was called the Redskins from 1933 up through 2019. In its first year, the team was called the Braves, named after the baseball franchise which – at that point – played in Boston.

Within that time, there were plenty of calls for the team to change its name – which many viewed as racist.

While not the only pro sports team to have a Native American as their mascot, the Redskins were one of the the most prominent modern examples of that controversy.

A number of groups, including the National Congress of American Indians, viewed the name ‘Redskins’ as a racial slur and spent decades trying to get the name changed.

That change finally came in 2020 amid a wave of racial tension and protests throughout that summer in the wake of the murder of George Floyd.

After staying strong in his convictions to keep the name in previous years, former team owner Dan Snyder announced they would retire the moniker in July of 2020.

For a while, the team was just simply known as the ‘Washington Football Team’ – before eventually becoming the Commanders in 2022.

For years, team owner Dan Snyder resisted calls to change the name of the team

Finally, after years of pressure from individuals and groups, Washington changed its name

Since that rebrand, many with ties to the team have not liked the new name – with some advocating to return to the old nickname.

Mike Florio of ProFootballTalk suggested that Quinn wearing that bootleg merch felt like a ‘trial balloon, an intermediate step toward potentially bringing back the name and logo’ – with the writer saying ‘There are no accidents’.

He later walked that belief back slightly: ‘It’s our understanding that Quinn wore the T-shirt on his own, without the team knowing he’d be doing it. Although it might have seemed like a trial balloon of sorts for the head coach to display a mashup of the current logo and the former logo, the Commanders aren’t testing the waters for a potential revival of the abandoned name and logo, or for incorporation of aspects of the old logo into the new one.’

But even if this was an accident – there are also issues of legality that come about with this shirt.

‘The T-shirt is not officially licensed,’ Florio reported. ‘The bots flooding social media with links to purchase the shirt are peddling something that infringes on the organization’s trademarks. 

‘The fact that Quinn inadvertently aided and abetted infringement efforts creates a separate set of headaches for the team, which will need to mobilize its lawyers to cease-and-desist the purveyors of the T-shirt in order to protect the associated copyrights.’

Many fans have been unhappy with the re-brand to Commanders, which happened in 2022

But the issue of Quinn wearing unofficial merchandise is one equally difficult to understand 

Other writers shared a similar belief that the logo (and the fact that it was on knockoff merchandise) was bad news for the coach and the team.

‘Dan Quinn in bootleg merchandise. The NFL is not going to like this,’ Dallas Cowboys writer Clarence Hill Jr. wrote on Twitter.

ESPN’s Jason Reid wrote, ‘Everything associated with the former name gets people going, one way or another. They just drafted a QB with the second overall pick. New GM just had his first draft. New head coach is leading the rookies. Optimism abounds. 

‘I just don’t understand the strategy in doing anything to take the focus away from the excitement on the field. If it was a trial balloon, there are ways that could have been done better than the new HC wearing a bootleg shirt. Nike pays for him to wear its shirts. 

‘I get that fans like the shirt and don’t think it matters, but Nike has millions of reasons why it expects that coach to be wearing official apparel. Anyway, in my experience, these things have always added up around there. But maybe everything will be fine this time.’ 

Whether or not Quinn will face punishment from the team or the league – or if the team decides to go after the sites peddling this bootleg merchandise – remains to be seen.