A press release went out today from the Washington pro football team touting “unprompted” email from “almost 200 people who identified themselves as Native Americans or as family members of Native Americans” who support use of the R-word as the team name. The methodological shortcomings of the “community voices” effort speak for themselves. While today’s press release hasn’t been published online, yet, a very similar release went out last week, and was covered in Politico. 

It is hard not to wonder whether this extraordinarily flimsy effort isn’t an attempt to compensate for our student attorneys’ evisceration of the team’s continued reliance on a single ten-year-old telephone poll question as proof that the name is not offensive to Native Americans.