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The Washington Football Team is set to finally reveal its new name and logo next month, but a website may have already spoiled the surprise.
CBS Sports reports WashingtonAdmirals.com redirected to the team's official website, WashingtonFootball.com at the time of publication on Tuesday (January 4), nearly a full month ahead of the scheduled naming announcement on February 2.
The "Admirals" nickname is among the nine finalists previously confirmed by the team to be in consideration for the 2022 name change along with "Armada," "Presidents" and "Red Hogs."
As of Wednesday, however, the website redirects to the "Who We Are" page for the Giving Kitchen, "a food service community meeting crisis with compassion and care."
It's possible that Washington didn't set up the domain and someone else could have done so for a variety of reasons, but "Admirals" was the only rumored nickname to be included with "Washington" in a link to the Football Team's website as of this week.
In August, Washington shared the latest episode of its YouTube series Making the Brand, which concluded with team president Jason Wright, head coach Ron Rivera and general manager Martin Mayhew going through the final three names, all of which were edited out.
"So the three that we'll go through are: [beeped out], [beeped out] and [beeped out]," Wright says in the video.
Rivera responds by saying he "really liked" one of the names, but again, the video is conveniently censored not to reveal the mystery options.
Nicki Jhabvala of the Washington Post reports the episode was filmed in July and the team has, in fact, narrowed its options to three. Additionally, Wright told Jhabvala "we're always a few steps ahead of that in the process," in regards to the team actually being ahead of the show in its rebranding process.
The franchise launched the WashingtonJourney.com website in February, which gave fans the option to decide on a new moniker to be used beginning in 2022.
"We started out with 40,000 submissions and began from there to winnow down to a smaller amount," Wright says in the video. "It gave us a broad view of how the public and the fan base feel about us as an organization and where they want to see us go."
Last April, the franchise said it was still considering roughly 30 names as potential options, with the following eight being included as options shown to fans in the Making the Brand video:
- Armada
- Brigade
- Commanders
- Defenders
- Presidents
- RedHogs
- RedWolves
- Washington Football Team
Wright specified, however, that the eight teams mentioned were "just a selection of names that happened to show up in the video our team produced.
Washington also shared potential new logos during the video.
Last October, Wright told WJLA that the "Washington Football Team" name was likely to remain until the 2022 season, noting "[2021] is fast because of how the brand has to come together through uniforms, through approval processes through the league.
"Next year is fast. There is a pretty good chance we will still be the Washington Football Team next season. We could get there quicker, it's actually pretty hard to get there that quickly because of all the steps that need to happen."