In an irony that will surely be lost on team owner Dan Snyder, the Washington Redskins are being kicked off their land.
From the Washington Post:
Interior Secretary Sally Jewell told D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser this spring that the National Park Service, which owns the land beneath Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium, was unlikely to accommodate construction of a new stadium for the Redskins unless the team changes its name.
Jewell oversees both national park land and America’s trust and treaty relationships with Native American tribes.
Her decision not to extend the District’s lease of the RFK land badly hinders Bowser’s bid to return the Redskins to D.C.—and boosts efforts to lure the team across the Potomac to Northern Virginia.
Jewell, who has been an outspoken critic of the team’s controversial name, added that adjusting the federal lease on the property, which doesn’t expire for another 22 years, is “not likely to be a priority for the administration.” The team’s owner Dan Snyder, who has vowed to never change the team’s name, has long been interested in building a new stadium in the DC area.
There’s actually a great precedent for this. As we explained in 2013,
The showdown began in 1961, when John F. Kennedy’s interior secretary, Stewart Udall, who’d committed to ending segregation anywhere in his sphere of influence, declared his intent to break pro football’s last color bar…The call for integration was met with opposition, most notably from the team’s owner, George Preston Marshall, a laundromat magnate turned NFL bigwig who had held firm for years. Udall had one advantage over Marshall: The team’s new home field, DC Stadium (later renamed RFK Memorial), was federal property. With Kennedy’s approval, Udall gave Marshall a choice: He could let black players on his team, or take his all-white squad to someone else’s gridiron.”
Don’t worry, Washington fans: There’s always Virginia (or stay in Maryland).
