Washington Commanders’ new head coach Dan Quinn has found himself in hot water as of late after wearing a t-shirt displaying a portion of the team’s former logo over the weekend. But despite the controversy, Quinn wasn’t all that apologetic about the moment when discussing it on Tuesday.
The old logo obviously comes with ideologies about Native Americans that was debated about for decades before the organization finally decided to change their team name and logo back in 2020, first as “Washington Football Team” before later settling on being the Washington Commanders.
The Commanders’ organization handled the situation by largely ignoring it, offering no comment on the situation just a day after it happened.
Quinn addressed the situation on Tuesday, claiming that he just wanted to “bridge the past and the present” of the organization with the shirt.
“I think one of the parts of me taking this job, I was excited to bridge the past and the present,” Quinn said, via Nicki Jhabvala of the Washington Post. “What a cool privilege that is to do. I also recognize there’s a lot of layers to that. So it was a great lesson for me. What I really hate is that any attention that would’ve been taken away from these rookies and this awesome crew. Nobody wants to do that.”
Clearly, Quinn doesn’t exactly care, or at least understand the kind of negative connotations that come with the old logo that the team used to wear on their helmets.