Commanders

Landover sits just outside Washington, D.C., inside the Capital Beltway, and for decades the only reason a national television audience learned the name was the football team playing there on Sundays. The franchise itself started elsewhere: George Preston Marshall founded it on 9 July 1932 as the Boston Braves, renamed it the Boston Redskins a year later, then moved the operation to the capital in 1937 as the Washington Redskins. That name stayed in place for more than eighty years, through controversy over its racial connotations that finally forced a change — first to the placeholder Washington Football Team for the 2020 and 2021 seasons, then to the Washington Commanders in 2022.

The club carries five NFL championships, though the gap between them tells its own story: titles in 1937 and 1942 came before the Super Bowl era existed, and the three that followed — after Super Bowl XVII, XXII and XXVI — all arrived within a single decade under coach Joe Gibbs. That run produced Super Bowl XVII, where running back John Riggins carried the ball so relentlessly against Miami that he took the game's MVP award almost as an afterthought to what his offensive line, nicknamed the Hogs, had done up front. Quarterback Joe Theismann, the 1983 NFL MVP, and Hall of Famers such as Darrell Green and Art Monk built their careers in that same stretch.

No perfect season sits on the résumé — in 1972 the club instead found itself on the wrong end of history, beaten in Super Bowl VII by a Miami team that finished undefeated. Games at Northwest Stadium, expanded to 64,000 seats, still carry the old rivalries with the Cowboys and the Eagles, the fixtures that matter most to fans who remember the Gibbs years. What the club has not managed since is a return to that level: no championship has followed the 1991 season, and the planned move to a new stadium on the old RFK site, still years from opening, has yet to change that.