The Rams unveiled new uniforms today. They are actively bad.
To understand why they are bad, you have to understand that, for basically their entire history, the Rams have had one of the nicest, cleanest looking uniforms in the league; it’s just that they refused to wear them most of the time. The Rams blue-on-yellow combination had already been sidelined once, at the onset of the millenium, when the Rams, fresh off winning a superbowl, up and decided to shift to a darker navy blue and gold, which looked more like poop brown. The Rams would later bring back their original uniforms as throwbacks, much to the happiness of literally everyone, but they stuck to their guns through much of the Rams post-Super Bowl slump. When Sean McVay came on board and made the Rams not actively terrible, the Rams used their throwback unis for their home games. And again, everyone was happy with this arrangement.
This is to say that fans weren’t exactly clamoring for a new set of uniforms that (once again) sidelines the thing everyone likes in favor of some shit some marketing exec has promised Stan Kroenke and the Rams trust is “bold”, “agile”, “synergistic”,”customer focused”, and above all else, will make them a metric shitton of money as fans begrudgingly buy tons of new merchandise. In 5-10 years, when the Rams old uniforms return (again), lip service will be paid to “tradition”, and NFL fans will fork over more money to get the new things with the new players they like. It’s a brilliant ploy the NFL is using to great effectiveness.
All the NFL uniforms reveals have either broken some shit that didn’t need fixing (see: the Rams, the Patriots, especially the Falcons, holy shit the Falcons), rehashed some shit that everyone liked and presented it as new (the Browns, the Chargers, the Bucs), or really didn’t do anything that can be justified as a change (the Colts using a slightly different shade of blue).
The simplest reason for this boils down to money. Changing your logo, changing the unis or tweaking a color is the easiest way for the NFL to make money, as there will always be a subset of fans who will fork out the hundreds of dollars to get a new Matt Ryan jersey, no matter how painfully ugly it is.
But it also speaks to the NFL’s inherent need for their always, always be something to talk about, and to keep the NFL and its various teams in the news, especially in the midst of a pandemic. Uniform reveals always generate lots of conversation.
The NFL has thrived partially on its ability to turn the mundane sausage making of business decisions into must see TV. The NFL season never ends as much as it simply rolls into its next phase. The NFL Scouting Combine is little more than a meat market where the NFL’s strange contingent of alleged smart men and tough guys can ask young men dumb questions in an effort to make them deliberately uncomfortable. NFL Free Agency kicks off with a “legal tampering” period which is an oxymoron in and of itself, wherein the NFL can assault its viewership with loads of high numbers that undermine the fact that NFL teams still don’t fully guarantee the majority of contracts. The NFL Draft sees talented young men forced to sign with bad teams who have no intentions of winning in the name of “parity”, and the endless pre-draft coverage assists in making the players faceless commodities in that are less “human” or more “how is this gonna affect my fantasy team”, their personal lives and Wonderlic scores tossed out in an endless cloud of smoke from allegedly smart people trying to outsmart each other.
Uniform reveals that happen throughout the offseason are meant to be the glue that holds barren news cycles together. Uniform unveilings tend to underscore the fact that the NFL wants its players to be faceless pawns sold in mass to a marketplace willing to overlook that playing football probably contributes to killing people. No one player can be above the shield — did I mention that Colin Kaepernick still isn’t employed? — and these uniforms assist in doing so. If you’re focusing on shiny new unis for your favorite team, you probably can’t remember that one time where the league fined your favorite player DeAngelo Williams for not promoting breast cancer awareness how the NFL wanted him to.
Last season, Odell Beckham Jr was fined $14,000 for wearing his pants above the knees, in a move the league said was for “safety purposes”. Beckham also had to be removed from a game because he was wearing a visor that wasn’t approved by one of the NFL’s sponsors. Saints linebacker Demario Davis got smacked with a $7,015 fine for wearing the wrong headband. (It later got overturned.) Punitive fines are handed out for people wearing low cut socks, not appropriately tucking in t-shirts, and for having visors with too much tint.
The NFL’s uniform policy is four fucking pages long, covering everything from how big towels can be (no more than 6 by 8) to using 376 words to dictate what color cleats can be (black, white, or team colors, except during the NFL sanctioned “My Cleats, My Cause” week). Both Richard Sherman and Colin Kaepernick were once fined for wearing Beats by Dre instead of Bose headphones before a game; wearing the logo of an “unauthorized” brand can carry fines of up to $10,000. And that doesn’t even get into the variety of ways NFL teams are handicapped from making uniforms standing out from each other.
It’s hard not to think of this as another way in which the NFL’s predominately white ownership structure can impose punitive punishments on the league’s predominately black player base for being individuals. It’s also hard not to think of this explicit stripping of personal identity away from the players as a means to disassociate those affected by playing the game from the people we see on the field. As a Washington football fan that hates himself, I find myself frequently shocked when I don’t recognize players whose names I know without their helmets.
So yeah; a bunch of teams revealed new (or old) uniforms this season, and almost all of them are varying degrees of “meh” to “someone was clearly sniffing glue when they designed Atlanta’s uniforms”. I’m sure they make for good content during these dry as fucking times for sports content. But the NFL’s actual uniform policy is as draconian as it is punitive and petty, and that should be far more newsworthy than yet another NFL team creating yet another butt ugly uniform that they’ll replace with its much better previous version a few years from now.
The only person I hate more than Dan Snyder is myself for being a fan of that team.
The Bucs, Seahawks, and Jags uniforms are far worse than anything the Rams could make up, but what sucks about the Rams is that they had arguably the best uniforms out there and, as you pointed out, they cannot help themselves by not fucking it up.
Seahawks might have the best jersey’s i the league,
I think the opposite. When they won the SB it felt like a 90’s children’s cartoon won the SB.
I don’t really get that, but okay. I love the colors, and the lime green in there.
IDK about “lime” …they look more like fluorescent Vuarnet V shirts circa 1991 with godawful 90’s cartoon robot numbers like the Power Rangers forgot who the GoBots were.
I like them precisely because of how ugly they are. They’re probably the most unique unis in the league. I don’t know, something about the Seahawks color scheme does it for me. It’s like everyone hating the Browns unis prior to this one, and I loved them because they didn’t look like any other jersey.
The only Seahawks unis I think are unequivocally butt are their highlighter green ones.
I can’t even. They were fine in the 80’s and 90’s then they went all grey (same ugly grey from head to toe) with Shawn Alexander (shoot me!) which was horrible and now they are even worse.
I should post a Listification on Seahawks uni’s just to show you guys how wrong you are!
(no I shouldn’t nor will I)
…perhaps I’m a sucker for nostalgia?
I love the design of those uniforms, but not the colors, funny enough. I think the old colors worked better. Those old silver helmets were great.
I like them
Why?
I just don’t see anything glaringly wrong with them, numbers look a little funky, but otherwise, they are fine.
If someone was willing to pay me anywhere from hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars a year, I would wear whatever the hell they told me to, however the hell they wanted me to.
Terrible awful uniform design. Absolute shit. However, I believe that teams are not allowed to go back and make a throwback uni their main uni. So, once a design is retired, it can only be brought back for throwback, or alternate use. This is about money, obviously. The more uniforms, the better. So, the Rams can’t go back to the old royal blue and yellow uniforms. To use those colors, it had to be a new design. Plus, the more unique elements in a design, the more things you can license to the video games. I think that makes as much scratch as garment sales. It’s the reason they went to those weird referee uniforms. The basic striped ref shirt is rights free, but if you have a unique look, EA, or whoever, has to license that design if they want their video game to look authentic. That’s also why every team has to have its own font for numbers and player names.
“I think that makes as much scratch as garment sales.”
Also making scratch for the league, and *not* mentioned in the article–
The fact that any business which wishes to sell official NFL items/be licensed to be seen on TV as a player wears *your* item during a game, has to shell out around One Million dollars to the league…
And the reason I know that, is because waaaaay back in the early ’00’s, when I first worked for the dance wear company (where we made the cheerleading uniforms for… in the beginning about 1/4-1/3 of the league’s squads–and by the time I left, about half the league’s squads), we used to make custom undershirts for many of the Vikings’ players, and a few of the guys who *used* to play for the Vikes.
Jeff George was one of the *former* players–i remember cutting sleeves in 2-3 different colorways, in the last couple seasons he played.
We got OUT of the custom undershirt business,long about the time that UnderArmor started going big, because UA was willing to shell out that Million bucks to the league, to be “The Officially Licensed ______ of the NFL.”
My bosses/our company’s owners WERE offered the “opportunity” to pay a million,so that they could also keep selling undershirts to the 20-or-so Vikes players who’d buy our shirts in a typical season… buuuuut, understandably, my bosses decided that it was much more financially viable, to just stop making our shirts.**
If we’d had a way of upscaling our production, so that we could’ve made shirts to sell to the general public, the “opportunity” to purchase the rights to sell our design would’ve been an excellent business decision. But we were just a small company (15 or so employees total at the time–including the part time & contract folks), so there was no way to make that amount of expense a viable option.
(**Ours had a small gusset of extra fabric where the underarm, armseye, and body’s side-seams met, so that if/when a player’s shirt was grabbed as his arms were fully extended, the shirt wouldn’t rip out in the armpit, like they would with a typical tightly fitting long-sleeved shirt. That gusset design was what had so many of the former Vikes’ players–QB’s in particular, still ordering undershirts from us, long after they’d been traded.)
Also, another reason why all the teams are getting new looks/new logos/trying to lift cash out of fans’ pockets:
This is the year that the new Uniform Contract begins/the old one expired:
https://www.sportspromedia.com/news/nfl-nike-uniform-deal
If I read and understand the language in that SportsPro article correctly, y’all can expect another slew of redesigns in 2028, when this new contract expires.😉
Excellent article, as always, KC!
I just wanted to add the Uniwatch link, for anyone who wants to go down a rabbit-hole of FABULOUS uniform details, pedantry, and history:
https://uni-watch.com/
Paul Lukas has been writing/running Uniwatch for… yeeeeears now, and he’s got ALL the fabulous tiny details on EVERYTHING to do with Sprotz-uniforms😉😁🤗
Here’s a good article on Lukas, himself;
https://gothamist.com/arts-entertainment/talking-with-paul-lukas-of-uni-watch-about-uniforms-and-much-more
Seeing this year’s new designs, I was VERY reminded of Paul and his term “Scuba Suit” for that lazy/”meh” head-to-toe look😉
I think the colors look great — but the design team has no idea what they’re doing with them.
Literally every single decision they’ve actively made screams out “Look, it’s A Design Element!” The color gradient on the numbers is completely out of touch with the otherwise solid bold color blocks; the curves of the Rams logo look fucking great, so of course the design team went with a solid straight stripe on the pants.
(The horns are another element they’ve fucked up. On the helmets and shoulder pads, the horns are killer. The curves looks great. Rendered in 2D and forced to assume the straight edge of an “A” they look preposterous in a way typically unseen outside a freshman-year graphic design class.)
There’s power in the colors, but the execution of the details renders them childish.