MAILBAG! D-III realignment, new team nicknames and more:

Good morning, and thanks for your continued support of Extra Points.

Friends, I am back in Chicago after a few days in Atlanta for the NIL Summit. I'm glad I went, but I'm also glad to be back.

I need a little more time to really digest all the conversations I had over the last 36 hours...and shoot, I'm still trying to make sense of all the reading I've done since NASSM...and the stacks of FOIAs I haven't had a chance to dig through yet.

So this is a great day for a mailbag, in my humble opinion. Let me take a few of your questions.

Extra Points reader (and coworker, but shhhh) Anthony asks:

Good question!

So apparently, George Washington decided that the Colonials nickname "could no longer unify their community"

Way back in my Substack days, I wrote about similar decisions made with Dixie State and Valpo. These are political powder keg decisions that could easily be turned into culture war flashpoint battles, something absolutely no administrator or fan wants. But hey, words change, and schools change, and universities have been changing nicknames almost as long as they've had nicknames. We don't have too many schools that go by Fightin' Methodists anymore. That's probably fine.

There are a lot of directions the GW community could go here. If you want to stick with the patriotic theme, there are still plenty of options, despite the George Mason Patriots and my American Eagles already laying claim to that space. But personally, I'd recommend GW embrace something completely different, and a little bit stupid. I'd go with the Hippos.

If the school brass would prefer something a little more on the nose, well, just become the George Washington University Lobbyists. Or the George Washington University Real Estate Grab.  Or the George Washington University Rich Kids Who Couldn't Get Into Princeton.

Lots of possibilities here. Get creative!

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