Every fall Sunday morning I wake up earlier than I do during the winter, spring, and summer months. It’s football season and Sunday mornings are like Christmas mornings. Honestly, I’m a baseball guy, but football captures an excitement in it’s own right that baseball can’t. Making fans wait six days every week to watch their team for three hours play one of 16 games that usually carries major implications for the season is drama that no other sport comes close to. Put it this way: There’s a ninth inning every night. There’s a two minute drill once a week.

I’m recently engaged to a lovely girl named Jasmin. She’s Mexican-American. No, she’s not the biggest sports fan and to her, the seasons never end. This is our first year living together which means this is our first year sharing a television. Just a few months ago the NBA playoffs were on most evenings and when they weren’t, the NHL playoffs were. And after those sports concluded, baseball was just beginning the Dog Days of summer. Poor girl. Baseball really is torture for a non-fan.

But this season, football season, is her least favorite.

My favorite football team is the Los Angeles Wetbacks. Yes, I know the name could be seen as a little racist but it has tradition and tradition is important. The Wetbacks have been playing football in Los Angeles for 81 years and throughout the years many efforts have been made to get the team to change their name. I don’t think the Wetbacks should change their name. When I used to watch football with my dad as a young kid, we’d cheer the Wetbacks on together. I remember him coming into my room at eight in the morning to wake me up for church and he’d say, “Let’s go spend an hour with God, then three with the Wetbacks!” I’d smile ear to ear as I jumped out of bed to get ready for church. I always wore a Wetbacks teeshirt under my button down and so did my dad.

I love Jasmin with all my heart. And in a perfect world her white fiancé’s favorite football team wouldn’t be the Los Angeles Wetbacks. She tells me how the name hurts her in ways I’ll never understand. I tell her, “It’s just a name. Don’t give it that kind of power to hurt you.” She tells me how the slur has been around long before the Los Angeles based football team. I tell her, “It’s been our name forever.” She tells me how her Mexican born parents boycott the local television channel the Wetbacks games are shown on. I tell her, “They need to get over it.”

I think my most compelling argument to her, and everyone else offended by the name is this: I don’t think about the hurtful slur when I say the name.

She says when she hears it, that’s all she thinks about.

I will concede that the team name Wetbacks is very dividing in a city like Los Angeles where over 50% of the population is Spanish speaking, but I look at the Redskins who represent Washington, D.C. Many have said, and again I don’t find this to be the case, that their team nickname is racially offensive. To those people I say this: Our nation’s capital is supposed to set the precedent for the rest of the country. Our elected officials and lawmakers preside there. And, for the first time in the history of America, we have a black president. If a first-time minority president living in the nation’s capital stands idly by while the Redskins of Washington D.C. play their 81st football season, why can’t the Los Angeles Wetbacks do the same?

You don’t always have to know why you do things. Some traditions are best left out from under the microscope. I know this: I love rooting on the Wetbacks. I always have and always will. The Wetbacks make me think of my dad and they make him think of his dad. The Wetbacks make me think of anticipating Sundays throughout the week in the fall. The Wetbacks are really important to me and I hope when Jasmin and I have children she let’s me pass down the tradition of Wetback Sundays to my kids.

I know the name of the team hurts her in ways I’ll never understand, but I don’t think she’ll ever understand how much I really love football.

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Adam Hawk is on Twitter: @ImAdamHawk