[Drake]

Jeff Hunt wrote a column for the Ottawa Sun explaining how the name came to be chosen. Ultimately, it seemed to be about the R on the helmet and the colors. Still not of a fan of the name.

When we announced we were looking for a team name, we heard from the universe. We had lots of suggestions.

At an event we had at the Grey Cup, at Real Sports in Toronto, a guy said: 'What about Red and Blacks?' I said Red and Blacks is a bit wordy, how about just RedBlacks? It was one of those casual conversations that was relatively unremarkable.

I went from that right to dinner with some of my partners. I happened to be sitting right across from Bill Shenkman. I said, 'Hey, what do you think of the name RedBlacks?' We call him Blunt Bill because he's not afraid to speak his mind. He immediately said he liked it. He kind of took more ownership in that name than I did

We hired Downstream. We started with a wall of names. We had some very specific criteria that we wanted to achieve. We wanted a name that was authentic to Ottawa. I didn't want to take the name Bears or Nationals -- or any other prominent existing sports names. We wanted something distinctive, unique and authentic to Ottawa.
And obviously translation was a factor, a big factor.

Any name that started with R gave us the possibility of preserving that iconic R on the helmet. When I called Russ Jackson, Tony Gabriel as well, to share the name, I wanted them to buy in ... I told them, 'It keeps that R on the helmet.' That immediately struck a chord with those guys and I started to feel like we were onto something.

We still had this wall of names. We started to pick them off one at a time.
We put out five names for focus groups. It wasn't five names just for the sake of it. Every one of those names we were seriously considering. Let's just say going into it, if we had thought one of the choices was the fifth-most popular and the focus groups were overwhelming to that name, we would have had to take that seriously.

We started to narrow in on RedBlacks. Red stands for desire, black stands for power. One of the things I did not know, in the mid- to late-1870s, when the Rough Riders started, one of the thoughts is they were named after the Roosevelt Rough Riders. They took the red and black colours from this regiment. I believe those colours influenced the colours of every Ottawa sports team since. I thought, what a tribute to Ottawa sports history -- even if you think about the guards on the Hill with their red and black colouring. It's just so synonymous with Ottawa history.

http://www.ottawasun.com/2013/06/08/...r-the-cfl-team