Let RFK Have the Team.
(Not that RFK. Stay with me)
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From a strictly nostalgic standpoint, this is cool: Congress is inching closer to ceding control of the land where Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium sits to Washington D.C., which would then be free to cut a deal and get the local NFL team back in town.
It’s been a minute, and it certainly isn’t that easy. But, you know — cool.
The Redskins, as the team then was known, last played at RFK in 1996. In their final home game just before Christmas that year, they beat up on the silly Cowboys, 37-10, after which Jack Kent Cooke hightailed the franchise to Landover, Maryland.
The owner dubbed the Maryland facility Jack Kent Cooke Stadium (catchy!), and a couple of years later it was renamed FedEx Field, which it was called through the awful Daniel Snyder years. After a brief detour as Commanders Field when the team was re-christened, naming rights went to Northwest Federal Credit Union, so now it is again a stadium, Northwest Stadium.
(I mean, ask the Astros — names change.)
But the place is old and too lame to continue, or so says the Commanders ownership group led by Josh Harris. Cooke rushed the construction project in the first place, and the building hasn’t aged well. Maryland and Virginia have both been courting the Commanders during the franchise’s quest for a new place to call home — but could D.C. sneak in there with a surprise nostalgia play?