Washington Commanders
Burgundy and gold runs deep. We’re talking about that kind of fandom – the kind that skips a generation at kitchen tables and gets worked into old jerseys; that sings too loudly in stadium parking lots and fights in the car park outside FedExField until someone remembers they’re family. You don’t have to guess what they’d like when you’re buying for that person. It isn’t hard if you know where to look. The issue with most gift guides is that they don’t know where to look. They check the boxes and stock up on stadium canvas prints and photo mugs that could belong to any sports team if you changed the logo and five words down on the page they call it a day.
We didn’t want to do that.
We’ve picked out gifts for a real Commanders fans. The person who doesn’t just follow the NFL but went to sleep thinking about Sean Taylor and woke up doing so throughout the lean years. The person who takes pride in their fandom and wants others to recognise it and take it seriously too. That fan deserves more than novelty sucksquirrel punk onsies.
We also thought about why you’re shopping. Maybe it’s a birthday during the season. Christmas when you have oneCommanders fan in an otherwise detached family and you just need to nail this one. Maybe it’s a friend that moved away and needs to hang something meaningful on their wall before they’ve even finished unpacking the kitchen boxes. Those were the kind of scenarios we thought about every time we sat down to make decisions on what stayed and what went.
If it was easy to find or helped us hit a license we wanted to keep, that didn’t automatically mean it made the cut. We asked ourselves would a real fan want this? Would it make a good gift? Would it travel well? Would it be appreciated, used and loved rather than thanked for and buried in a drawer? That’s a tough bar to clear and we killed a lot of options by asking that question.
The remaining entries are ones we’d browse ourselves if we wanted to buy for someone who bleeds burgundy and gold. And trust us, around these parts that’s more than a few of us.