There are plenty of very good reasons as to why the NFL franchise in Washington, D.C. is currently known as the Washington Football Team. That still doesn’t mean the whole thing looks super-weird during TV broadcasts and seems to be breaking the algorithms of social media networks that aren’t set up to handle such a generic title.
The delays of the college football season and Washington’s name change have really exposed some flaws in Twitter’s trending column algorithm in recent weeks. The platform spent a couple of weeks promoting college football games that had been canceled for months. Now, the lack of a traditional NFL franchise naming system (City/State + Team Name) meant that it looked like the Philadelphia Eagles were playing a generic video game squad without naming rights.
While that might just be a weird-looking quirk, it does appear that Twitter didn’t do enough to remove the franchise’s previous logo from their system. It still appears when you see the score of the game on the Explore page as well as when the score shows up at the top of a user’s feed on their phone.
https://twitter.com/JackIsHuman/status/1305207967294337030
https://twitter.com/Sooozn/status/1305202725056061440
Meanwhile over on the TV broadcast, it looks like Fox did everything they were supposed to do in regard to cleaning up the WFT name and logo in their graphics. But that still doesn’t stop it from looking generic as hell…
It’s something we’re all going to have to get used to. Perhaps for the long haul as WFT owner Dan Snyder told the Wall Street Journal this weekend that it’s entirely possible this could become the permanent name of the franchise. Given what we know about Snyder and how he loves to make money, it seems unlikely he’d miss out on the chance to not only create a new logo for merchandising but then up the value of WFT merchandise as a collector’s item.
Whatever happens, somebody better wake Twitter up so they’re prepared next time. Lord knows WFT can make plenty of bad tweet decisions all by themselves.
[PFT]
About Sean Keeley
Along with writing for Awful Announcing and The Comeback, Sean is the Managing Editor for Comeback Media. Previously, he created the Syracuse blog Troy Nunes Is An Absolute Magician and wrote 'How To Grow An Orange: The Right Way to Brainwash Your Child Into Rooting for Syracuse.' He has also written non-Syracuse-related things for SB Nation, Curbed, and other outlets. He currently lives in Seattle where he is complaining about bagels. Send tips/comments/complaints to sean@thecomeback.com.