In his writing here about the dearth of openly gay players on the active rosters of professional sports teams, Travis Waldron’s discussed a range of issues that have factored into the perception that athletics are a largely heterosexual pursuit. There’s the theory that the locker room is an unfriendly environment that’s been partially dispelled by straight allies like Chris Kluwe and Brendon Ayanbadejo. The persistent use of homophobic insults by fans suggests that the problem might be more in the stands than in players-only areas. And there’s the question of how being publicly out of the closet might affect a player’s negotiating power or sponsorship deals.

But this week’s given us a different kind of story about homophobia in sports, that of Giants reliever Jeremy Affeldt. Raised in a conservative environment, playing professional baseball sent Affeldt to cities where he met actual gay people, and gave him experiences that broadened his horizons. In Cincinnati, a gay Starbucks employee welcomed Affeldt’s son. And as he came to know San Francisco, Affeldt also came to learn more about people who had previously frightened him so much that he literally hid from the public. As the AP reports:

The ex-military brat said Monday he was so uncomfortable in San Francisco that he would seclude himself. ”I didn’t leave my hotel room when we came to play the Giants or A’s. I didn’t want to go out or see anyone,” he said. ”There was a profession of being wrong. I’ve come to that from a deep angle. I’ll probably get a lot of flak from the church for it, but I believe I’m right.”…

”There’s a chapter in there of me coming to San Francisco and being hesitant because I had homophobia, and now I don’t,” he said. ”I see more San Francisco as a city of love and a city of passion and compassion. It’s unbelievable this city. To see that and to have my heart change as a city I didn’t ever want to come to, to a city that I’m so thankful I’m going to be part of for a long time, it talks about that. For me, it was an awesome deal.”

We normally think about sports in terms of their ability to give different kinds of people the opportunity to excel, and through that athletic success, to disprove stereotypes about, say, the masculinity of gay men, or the temperament of African-Americans. But sports also put us in the stands with people who are different from us, and take young men and women to places that they might never have been able to afford to go, or brave enough to go, on their own, and expose them to ideas and people they might otherwise have never encountered. Someone like Chris Kluwe might have come into the NFL a straight ally, but if Major League Baseball turned Affeldt into one, and specifically into someone who is publicly reconciling his Christian faith and his renunciation of homophobia, that speaks to the power of professional sports to change minds in a very different ways.

Reading through Forbes’ list of the 71 most powerful people in the world this afternoon, I was struck by something interesting. For all that we talk about the influence of culture on both society and individuals, there only two people involved in the production or distribution of culture or the arts on the list.

There are a lot of figures from tech companies, many of which are made more valuable by cultural content, on the list. Google’s Sergey Brin and Larry Page are tied for 20th on the list. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg comes in at 27th. Apple CEO Tim Cook is 35. Robin Li, who founded and runs Baidu, China’s largest search engine ranks 64th.

But in comparison to all of those tech titans, there are just two people involved in the production of entertainment or cultural content. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos comes it at 27th on the list. Joseph Blattner, who runs the International Federation of Association Football, is the 69th most powerful person according to the list, on the grounds that he “runs the world’s most popular sport–and unofficial religion.”

It’s notable both that neither of them are artists—they’re both on the business and distribution side of content. The people who have power, apparently, are not the ones who come up with the ideas, images, and sounds that reach wide audiences, but those who come up with the paradigm-shifting means of distributing them, whether it’s the broadcast deals for FIFA matches, or the Kindle. And while content is an important part of Amazon’s business, the company’s come a long way from being a book retailer. Instead of just eliminating local bookstores, it’s now going after big box stores.

Similarly, it’s telling that the only head of a an organization that’s primarily a content creation enterprise is Blattner, and that he’s involved with sports, rather than with movies, music, or television production. Obviously FIFA games reach an enormous number of people, and anyone who’s thought about the cable package in the United States knows how critically important sports, particularly football, are to maintaining the viability of cable as a subscription service. But that it’s sports and Kindle sales in the mix rather than a television network head or a movie director says a lot about what it takes to get on the Forbes list in the first place. Numbers, it seem, matter more than ideas.

Brittney Griner, the Baylor University basketball star who made headlines this spring both when Dallas Mavericks Mark Cuban offered her a tryout to see if she’d be able to play competitively in the National Basketball Association rather than the WNBA—she ultimately signed with the Phoenix Mercury, a women’s team—and then when she confirmed that she’d always been open about her sexual orientation—she is gay—with people who knew her in person, even in Baylor’s observantly Christian environment. Now, in an a pair of interviews with ESPN, Griner explains that even though she was able to be personally out of the closet, the women’s basketball team encouraged her to keep the story from going national during her career:

In a series of interviews — including one on camera Friday — for an ESPN The Magazine and espnW.com story set to hit newsstands later this month, Griner said her silence during college was because Mulkey and her staff were concerned about the program’s image.

“It was more of a unwritten law [to not discuss your sexuality] … it was just kind of, like, one of those things, you know, just don’t do it,” Griner said Friday. “They kind of tried to make it, like, ‘Why put your business out on the street like that?’”

But Griner reiterated on Friday that her sexuality was an open secret at Baylor.

“I told Coach [Mulkey] when she was recruiting me. I was like, ‘I’m gay. I hope that’s not a problem,’ and she told me that it wasn’t,” Griner said. “I mean, my teammates knew, obviously they all knew. Everybody knew about it.”

It’s unfortunate that Baylor basically told Griner that her sexual orientation was no big deal—as long as, by their definition, she didn’t make it that way. And her experience raises interesting questions about what it means for a person to be out of the closet, particularly if their lives are bifurcated between their personal social experiences and a national role.

Baylor’s question, as Griner phrased it, “Why put your business out on the street like that?” speaks to the difference beween so-called tolerance and actual acceptance of LGBTQ people. In the absence of confirmation that someone is gay, they’re assumed to be straight, in part because that’s an assumption that makes people who have little experience with gay people more comfortable. Heterosexuality isn’t “business” that makes anti-gay people uncomfortable to encounter. It’s a neutral default. And because of that assumed neutrality, heterosexuality isn’t something that it’s possible to be “out” about. It’s presumed to be visible even if a theoretically heterosexual person isn’t actually dating someone in a way that publicly confirms their sexual orientation. Heterosexuality can only be disproved. Homosexuality or bisexuality, by contrast, aren’t necessarily visible to a casual observer who chooses not to see the possibility that a figure like Griner could be gay. But that LGBTQ people have to confirm their sexual orientations, at this point, says as much about outsiders who assume they must be straight as it does about LGBTQ people themselves.

And it’s that dynamic that upsets the long-established narrative of coming out particularly for public figures. If Griner was out to her friends, family, and potential partners at Baylor, is the fact that a national audience didn’t know or think that she might be gay on her, or on that audience? Coming out has been framed as a triumphal process, both for the person who finally gets to acknowledge their true identity in public after suffering under pressure to hide, and for people who benefit from the knowledge that there are happy gay people in, say, college sports. But conversely, there’s something frustrating about the idea that Griner, who was out to people who know her in real life already, has to inform a national audience who assumed she was straight by lazy default that, no, actually, she’s gay. It’s great that Griner’s willing to use her experience to educate a national audience about what it’s like for a talented gay woman to coexist with an institution that has openly homophobic statements of principals on its books. But that her experience still seems novel enough to merit news coverage says less about her courage, and more about the lack of imagination of viewers at home who hadn’t bothered to think about Baylor’s treatment of gay and potentially gay players until Griner stepped forward.

This is the second in a series of posts, corresponding with horse racing’s Triple Crown, examining safety issues facing the sport. Part one appears here.

When nine horses leave the gates at Pimlico in the second leg of horse racing’s Triple Crown Saturday afternoon, they will mark the end of a sporting era. For the last time, the Preakness Stakes will be run under medical and drug testing rules that are set solely by the state of Maryland, thanks to an agreement among eight mid-Atlantic and northeastern states that will set uniform medication and drug testing standards beginning in 2014.

The compact, agreed to by New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia and Massachusetts, is the result of push to bring some uniformity to horse racing’s medication and drug rules that has lasted for nearly a decade, years in which the sport has faced questions about both performance-enhancing drugs and therapeutic medications used to treat horses both in the days leading up to races and on race days themselves.

Horse racing banned the use of anabolic steroids in 2008, when Kentucky Derby winner Big Brown tested positive for Winstrol, a performance enhancing drug, and runner-up Eight Belles collapsed shortly after the finish line and was euthanized on the track. But other drugs, mostly therapeutic in nature and used to treat routine injuries, are still wildly prevalent, raising questions in an American industry that is dealing with higher rates of catastrophic breakdowns and fatalities among its horses than its foreign counterparts — and a general lack of data and research into how to improve it.

“Racing fatality rates in the U.S. are two- to three-times higher than other major racing countries that don’t allow phenylbutazone and other drugs,” Dr. Rick M. Arthur, the equine medical director at the University of California-Davis and the California Horse Racing Board, said at The Jockey Club’s annual meeting last year. “My international colleagues have no doubt our medication policies, especially in phenylbutazone, are the cause of this disparity. I’m not convinced it is that simple, but there is no question medication regulation is the most glaring difference between U.S. and other major racing countries.”

The eight-state compact is not the first major step toward addressing and improving the medication of horses in the United States — in a business regulated on a state-by-state basis, states have made their own adjustments to which drugs can be used and when they can be administered. But the compact is the biggest step in streamlining the process and standardizing medical practices and drug testing across state lines. With the help of scientists and experts across the industry, the eight states identified 24 drugs that are “appropriate for therapeutic use in racehorses to treat illness or injury” and set standards for when they can be administered and how much of the drugs can be present in a horse’s body on race day. It also identified other drugs that cannot be present in a horse on race day under any circumstances.

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Because this is apparently a week that involves a lot of me lowering my head slowly and deliberately to my desk a la Peggy Olson, First Lady Michelle Obama decided to trot out some very old talking points in her commencement address to the 2013 graduating class at Bowie State University:

“Today, instead of walking miles every day to school, they’re sitting on couches for hours, playing video games, watching TV. Instead of dreaming of being a teacher or a lawyer or a business leader, they’re fantasizing about being a baller or a rapper,” Obama continued. “Right now, one in three African American students are dropping out of high school, only one in five African Americans between the ages of 25 and 29 has gotten a college degree.”

But priorities should change, she said, because “getting an education is as important if not more important than it was back when this university was founded.”

While those statistics are absolutely worrisome, I’m pretty sure that the challenges of preparing a competitive resume, getting equal access to standardized test prep, navigating the admissions process, and managing the cost of financial aid are also relevant issues to this conversation. Some of those barriers have been priorities for her husband’s administration. Mrs. Obama acknowledged the odds that a number of the graduates faced to get to and complete their educations Bowie State, though she focused on the cost of tuition and difficult family situations more than other structural issues that might affect students’ abilities to get access to a college education. And she framed their success as a matter of personal will and determination. I can also see why she might have wanted to continue a conversation of long standing within African-American communities given the setting, and as part of her larger, and important historical lesson about the obstacles that black students have faced to get educated in America.

But this particular talking point, which both Mrs. Obama and the President use relatively frequently, could do more to address the structural elements that prop up a culture that values athletics over academics. Personal motivations may be a problem, but the massive public investment in college athletic facilities, the fact that coaches are some states highest-paid public employees, and the allocation of both scholarship money and admissions spots to athletes who are unlikely to complete their academic degrees before entering professional drafts. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to dismantle “the slander that a black child with a book is trying to act white,” but I’m not sure the fantasy career aspirations of black children are the only, or even the main thing, at issue here.

And if we’re going to talk personal motivations, wanting to be “a baller or a rapper” is not a dream that’s solely the property of African-Americans. America has three major televised singing competitions right now, American Idol, The Voice, and X-Factor, all of which promise that it’s possible to rise from anonymity to remarkable fame and a career in music, and the first of which actually became notorious for airing auditions of people who had neither the skills to realistically pursue their aspirations, nor the self-knowledge to recognize the gap between their abilities and their ambitions. Participation is hardly limited to African-American singers by design or choice. There are plenty of white folks who hope to make it big in the manner of Taylor Swift in the same way African-American boys might be dreaming of growing up to become Jay-Z.

The same is more true for sports than Mrs. Obama’s remarks would suggest. In Division I men’s basketball, 1,443, or 27 percent, of the 5,265 players who participated in the 2011-2012 season were white, while 3,158, or 59 percent were African-American. During that same season, in Division I baseball, the figures were most striking. 8,304, or 82 percent of the 10,093 players, were white that season. Clearly, in the college athletic programs that feed into careers in professional sports, there’s a great deal of white interest and participation, even if it isn’t evenly distributed by sport. Miami Heat star LeBron James may be an argument for skipping college in pursuit of a professional athletic career right out of high school, but so is Washington Nationals left-fielder Bryce Harper, who earned a GED and didn’t even finish high school in a classroom setting, all so he could focus on baseball instead, even though the idea that any ordinary person could emulate either of their paths is equally improbable.
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Chris Kluwe, the National Football League punter who has been an outspoken advocate for LGBT equality both inside and outside sports, announced Thursday that he will sign a one-year contract with the Oakland Raiders. Kluwe played the previous eight seasons for the Minnesota Vikings before being cut earlier this month after the Vikings selected a punter in the 5th round of April’s NFL Draft.

Kluwe, incidentally, is moving from one state that just passed marriage equality (Minnesota) to one where same-sex marriage is still illegal (California), and he told fellow LGBT ally Brendon Ayanbadejo that he will remain an advocate for LGBT rights when he joins the Raiders, Ayanbadejo wrote on FOXSports.com:

Kluwe is known for his mind and mouth, as well as his leg. He is a vocal advocate of equality in sports (and life), and says he will continue to speak for what he believes.

“I’m still going to be myself socially and continue to tweet and interact with my fans,” Kluwe said.

Kluwe and Ayanbadejo were both released by their teams this spring, immediately fueling speculation around the sports world that their advocacy had been a factor in the teams’ decisions. Even Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton (D) weighed in when Kluwe was cut, saying, “Yeah, I don’t feel good about it,” an implication that Kluwe’s outspokenness played a role in his release. Others raised similar questions when the Baltimore Ravens released Ayanbadejo.

Though Ayanbadejo remains unsigned, Kluwe’s new contract should put those concerns to rest. The reality is that the release of both players looked more like business decisions — Kluwe was due $1.45 million in 2013, nearly $1 million more than the Vikings will pay his rookie replacement. Ayanbadejo, meanwhile, was an aging 36-year-old linebacker who primarily played special teams, and considering that the Ravens handed out a record contract to quarterback Joe Flacco, his $940,000 salary at an easy-to-replace position made him expendable (he was hardly the only prominent Raven to fall victim to cost-cutting this offseason).

And as as Cyd Zeigler argued at OutSports when the Vikings cut Kluwe, immediate speculation without evidence that advocacy played a role in their releases can be counterproductive to the cause they are pushing, Ayanbadejo, Kluwe, and other players have fought to make the NFL a more open and inclusive place both for advocates of LGBT rights and for gay players. But painting football as a place where those voices still aren’t welcome, where speaking out carries the penalty of losing one’s job, only encourages allies to remain quiet and gay players to stay in the closet. And it ignores the progress the league as made. Despite hiccups along the way, the NFL has indeed become a more open place: not only are Kluwe and Ayanbadejo speaking out, but so are both NFL Players Association president Dominque Foxworth and NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, and the league has strengthened its efforts to rid the game of discrimination and homophobia.

If evidence existed that Kluwe and Ayanbadejo’s advocacy played a role in either situation, it should be publicized, shamed, and subject to the league’s non-discrimination policy. It’s far more likely, though, that Kluwe and Ayanbadejo were cut because football, as Zeigler explained, “is a numbers game.” Making legitimate business decisions doesn’t make a football team discriminatory, and treating legitimate business decisions as discriminatory only ensures that football will remain in the shadows of tolerance for far longer than it should.

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel will lay out a proposal Thursday for a $195 million basketball arena for DePaul University, a private Chicago university that spent $20 million in 2004 to make its current home, Allstate Arena, “a state-of-the-art facility.” The plan, according to reports from CBS Chicago, will require $125 million from taxpayers, with $70 million coming from a tax on hotel rooms and an additional $55 million coming from a common arena scheme known as tax-incremented financing (TIF).

Emanuel hasn’t talked openly about the plan, but an alderman on the city’s board told CBS that the plan, which includes hotels attached to the city’s convention center at McCormick Place, was about fostering economic growth. “Sometimes you have to make an investment in city resources to be able to generate tax dollars,” Ald. Pat Dowell said. But local arena expert Marc Ganis told the Chicago Sun-Times yesterday that it was “lunacy” to expect the plan to help the economy:

‘‘It’s lunacy,’’ he said straight off. ‘‘Sheer folly. It makes no economic sense whatsoever.’’ [...]

As someone who has worked on projects like these for decades, I can tell you there is absolutely no way for this to make any sense in any way. It is not in the realm of possibility.’’

DePaul has long wanted to abandon the Allstate Center, located about 17 miles away in Rosemont, for a facility closer to its Lincoln Park campus. The new arena, situated next to the McCormick Place convention center on Lake Shore Drive, would still be about seven miles from DePaul. The arena plan also includes proposals for new hotel, restaurant, and retail space around the convention center and arena. But why an arena, and one that DePaul will use just 18 times a year, needs to be a part of the redevelopment of that part of the city is unclear, especially since any plans to fill arena dates with concerts and other events would have to compete with the United Center, an arena just a few miles a way that is twice the size.

No matter what aldermen like Dowell say, the arena certainly isn’t included for economic benefits: studies have shown that arenas don’t actually have any. Instead, publicly-financed arenas and stadiums are far more likely to leave taxpayers saddled with debt they didn’t expect and without any of the economic benefits politicians and arena supporters promised.

TIF plans like Chicago wants to use rarely work out. A TIF plan creates a district around the new arena in which a portion of sales tax revenues will go toward paying off future arena debts. But actual revenues spurred by arena traffic almost always fall short of projections, as they have in Louisville, where the TIF district has failed to live up to its promise and left the city scrambling to make up the revenue gap. Louisville’s arena bonds are now at junk status, propped up only by the city’s willingness to pay them off with other sources of funding.

Chicago, though, need not look to Louisville to see why the arena isn’t a good idea. Chicago often uses TIF districts to promote redevelopment, and their failure has typically resulted in the city “raiding property-tax revenues that would otherwise be used for school funding,” as Field of Schemes’ Neil deMause noted today. That’s bad news for a city that is dealing with a $1 billion school funding gap, which it is trying to solve by closing dozens of schools across the city. So not only is the new arena plan likely to fall short of projections in a way that hurts the city’s general finances, it may hit it in a way that only exacerbates the school-funding problem Emanuel is desperately trying to solve.

Andrew Wiggins, the top-rated high school basketball player in the country and the most hyped teenage talent since Kevin Durant and maybe even LeBron James, will announce where he will spend a single year playing college basketball this afternoon. He has narrowed his choices to four — Kentucky, Kansas, North Carolina, and Florida State — but in the run-up to today’s decision, it seems no one knows where Wiggins is going except Wiggins himself. Rob Fulford, his coach at Huntington Prep in West Virginia jokingly changed his Twitter avatar this week to read “I don’t know where Andrew Wiggins is going.”

Wiggins has eschewed the spotlight since his recruitment began, avoiding interviews and keeping the process to himself and his family. Even today, a kid who could have his own The Decision-type special on ESPN won’t hold a press conference to announce his destination. Instead, there will be a single reporter in the room at a private ceremony with friends, teammates, students, and family at his high school.

That’s a rarity in today’s world of college sports, where recruiting has become a major business. Sites like Rivals.com and Scout.com emerged to rank recruits and assign star values to them. Media outlets from ESPN to the local dailies cover recruiting as fervently as they cover the athletes who are already on campus. Recruits now announce their decisions in made-for-TV press conferences, a row of hats with logos of their final few schools lining a tabletop in front of them. An athlete like Andrew Wiggins has more than 75,000 Twitter followers (at this writing), a world in which fan blogs parse his every word for a hint of where he may play college ball. And high school athletes who don’t even receive scholarship offers hold fake press conferences to announce that they’ll play football or basketball for a coach they’ve never actually talked to — all for a moment in the sun.

That’s a culture Andrew Wiggins apparently wants no part of. While his treatment of his choice has drawn criticism from fans who want to know where he is going and cynics who think he put off his decision until the last moment simply to draw attention, it’s ultimately a refreshing approach.
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The last three years have been good to Major League Baseball’s San Francisco Giants, who won two World Series crowns and emerged as a contender to win another in 2013. But they haven’t been as good to the roughly 800 workers who staff AT&T Park, the ballpark on San Francisco Bay the Giants call home.

Those workers, who staff AT&T Park’s concession stands, restaurants, and kitchens, haven’t had a pay increase since their contract with Centerplate, the company that staffs and maintains concessions at the stadium, expired in 2009. The workers, affiliated with Unite HERE Local 2, say negotiations have stalled, leading them to authorize a strike in a vote held across the street from the stadium Saturday afternoon.

The vote won’t automatically result in a strike; rather, it gives the union the choice to begin one at a later date. Both sides are set to return to the bargaining table this week for their sixth round of negotiations — and workers will continue to fight for pay increases and against changes to their health care and pension plans, they told ThinkProgress.

“I started here in 2010, and I haven’t seen a raise since I got here,” Anthony Wendlberger, a kitchen worker at AT&T Park said. “We’re not asking for an extravagant lifestyle. Just the basics. And a little respect.”

Negotiations center on three major issues, according to workers and union officials. Workers want pay increases they haven’t received for more than three years, and they are fighting changes to their pensions and health care coverage. They also want increased job security from the Giants in case the franchise doesn’t renew its contract with Centerplate. That would come in the form of a “successorship clause.”

The average AT&T Park employee earns $11,000 a year, according to union officials. The jobs are seasonal, and many hold second jobs, but they receive their health care through Centerplate. Under the current plan, a worker who staffs 10 events in a month receives health care for the next month, but Centerplate wants to increase that to 12 events per month under a new contract, workers said (A Centerplate spokesperson would not confirm that detail). That would make it impossible to obtain health coverage in months like June, when the Giants have just nine home games, and making health care harder to obtain is a major sticking point for the workers.

Gina Antonini, a spokesperson for Centerplate, said the company viewed the strike vote as an “unfortunate step” in the process, adding that it remains “confident the situation can be resolved at the bargaining table.” While Antonini would not offer specific details of Centerplate’s offer, she said it would “provide a pay increase that would keep the workers among the highest paid in the industry.”

Giants’ workers start at $10.45 an hour for their first 50 games and make between $13.52 and $19.44 an hour after that, according to Unite HERE. But in a city like San Francisco, where the cost of living is among the most expensive in the nation, being among the highest paid in the industry doesn’t mean as much as it would in other cities. Wendlberger said he doesn’t make enough to live in San Francisco; instead, he lives near Sacramento, a two-hour drive without traffic. “A lot of times, I might not go home” after games, he said, even though he has a wife and two young children at home. “Gas is expensive, so I stay with my brother or my mom.”

“Some people are saying we’re being greedy,” Wendlberger said. “We’ve got members living in public housing, we’ve got people on public assistance. There’s nothing greedy about wanting a basic lifestyle.”

The ultimate fight may not be with Centerplate but with the Giants franchise, which takes 55 percent of all concession sales, according to Unite HERE. On a $10 concession sale, the Giants’ cut amounts to $5.50, while workers’ salaries and benefits and operational costs are covered by the remaining $4.50. That money “goes straight into their pockets,” Patricia Ramirez, a kitchen worker who has worked Giants games for 13 years, said.

A Unite HERE release said the Giants team value has risen by 40 percent in the last three years, and concession and ticket prices have risen during that time too. Even reducing their share of each sale by 50 cents “would be huge,” Wendlberger said.

“We feel a major part is how much the Giants are taking, and I feel like it would be different if they would just step up to the plate and do the right thing,” he said. “We work for the Giants and their fans.”

“The Giants are the ones with the deeper pockets, the ones who could help,” Ramirez said.

Ultimately, Wendlberger said, the workers are hoping to avoid a strike, a sentiment Centerplate echoed in a Friday release calling on the union to “come to the table to find a solution that is win-win for both sides.”

“None of us want to strike,” Wendlberger said. “We enjoy our jobs. We want our jobs. We just need the basics.”

The never-ending dispute over whether the National Football League’s Washington Redskins should change their name is heating up again. Early in May, D.C. City Councilman David Grosso introduced a resolution asking the team to change its “racist and derogatory” name, an effort that even drew the attention of the team’s star quarterback, Robert Griffin III, who posted a cryptic tweet about the “tyranny of political correctness” that, it turned out, was in reference to efforts to change the title of the franchise he represents.

But Grosso’s non-binding resolution is the least of the Redskins’ worries. The big threat to the team and its owner, Dan Snyder, is the federal Trademark Trial and Appeal Board, which in February heard a case petitioning it to classify the word “Redskin” as a derogatory slur: as such, it wouldn’t be eligible for trademark protection. But even if it loses that case, the team will “NEVER” change its name, Snyder told the USA Today on Thursday:

“We will never change the name of the team,” Snyder told USA TODAY Sports this week. “As a lifelong Redskins fan, and I think that the Redskins fans understand the great tradition and what it’s all about and what it means, so we feel pretty fortunate to be just working on next season.”

What if his football team loses an ongoing federal trademark lawsuit? Would he consider changing it then?

“We’ll never change the name,” he said. “It’s that simple. NEVER — you can use caps.”

The trademark case won’t be resolved anytime soon — probably not until next year, and it will likely see appeals after that. The board stripped the Redskins of their trademark in 1999, only to have the decision overturned on a technicality (that petitioners waited too long to file their claim) in 2003. But the basic case is pretty strong: “Redskins” is plainly derogatory, a racial marker that various dictionaries define as “offensive” and a “term of disparagement,” and petitioners have this time structured the case in a manner that should avoid the timing technicality. Native Americans and activists have fought its use for years, with one, Clem Iron Wing, reportedly telling a school board in Wichita, Kansas — where a high school uses the nickname — that the “only way ‘redskin’ was ever used towards my people and myself was in a derogatory manner.” Pay close enough attention to the debate, and you’ll notice that no one — not even Snyder — defends the term on the grounds that it isn’t racist or derogatory. Instead, they argue that the team should keep it because it’s “tradition” and because 79 percent of Americans support it.

Losing the trademark wouldn’t force the Redskins to change the name. What it would do, however, is make it impossible to stop other people from using it. In short, Snyder wouldn’t be able to stop anyone else from making merchandise with the team name and undercutting official Redskins gear, or to charge anyone for using the name, changes that would cost Snyder considerable financial damage — “every imaginable loss you can think of,” according to attorneys in the 1999 case — and activists hope that would be enough to change his mind. Snyder, though, is a man of immense pride, and my suspicion is that he would try to eat his losses and keep the name out of spite, at least for the time being.

NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell isn’t likely to feel the same way. Goodell has thus far expressed a startling level of indifference toward the controversy, but if the Redskins lose the trademark — and the NFL’s ability to make money off their licensed and trademarked merchandise — that indifference will assuredly fade. Goodell might “understand the affinity for that name” among fans, but he won’t understand — or tolerate — big financial losses. Ideally, Snyder and Goodell would change the name because it’s plainly derogatory. Getting rid of it because using racist terminology is expensive, though, may have to suffice.