The Draw Play

Whelp, I had no idea this was in the works, and I’m not the biggest fan. The NFL has officially come up with a new uniform gimmick. RIVALRIES. It’s…meh. Before I go into critique on the individual uniforms, I want to talk about alternate unis as a whole for a bit.

I’m generally a fan of alternate uniforms as a concept. They may be just a gimmick that is meant to sell merch, but I like that artists are being given some free rein to experiment and throw ideas around. As long as they don’t start to dominate games with tons of alternates, I’m okay with this. But uniform creep is becoming a problem. The NBA is awful about it, you can turn on a game at any time and not know who is who because the famously Green and Cream Milwaukee Bucks are wearing blue, playing a Miami team wearing…pink. The MLB City Connect jerseys are even worse about it. These things are fun in a vacuum and some of them rule, but we start losing league identity when you never have any idea what a uniform will be at any given time. It’s the Oregon problem spread out to an entire league. What is Oregon Football’s actual, default look? They don’t have one. Uniform consistency helps create a sense of familiarity and identity. If I turn on a game with Notre Dame, I want to see those gold helmets, navy jerseys, and gold pants. Not whatever the fuck this is. It creates this strange disconnect where I know I am watching a team, but it doesn’t feel like I’m watching that team.

For the most part the NFL has been decent about keeping the alternate uniform identity crisis at bay. Such a small number of games per season requires them to keep a level of consistency where the other leagues can afford to fuck around. But it’s getting worse. Teams have typically had an alternate jersey in the tank for ages, but they rarely bust them out. Throwbacks are the same. When the NFL debuted Color Rush (A concept I loved), they kept it quarantined to Thursday night games, giving those games their own identity. But now? With each new re-design the number of uniforms grows. Teams now have multiple alternates like blackouts or whiteouts as well as throwbacks. On top of that, they now have a plethora of usable combinations, such as the Chargers wearing the powder blues with white pants. Or yellow pants. Or blue pants. The Chargers could conceivably not wear the same uniform combo more than once or twice in a season. That’s kinda dumb, and the best-looking team in the league starts feeling confused.

We need to give these teams two steady, unflinching looks. Home and Away. Then they can throw in an alternate once per year as appropriate. Maybe it’s a throwback uniform, maybe it’s a color rush, maybe it’s this rivalry gimmick, or a blackout/whiteout jersey. That can be the “special” game, and set up to play against another alternate, instead of having things like the Colts debuting their “Indiana Nights” jersey on a fucking Sunday afternoon. I love alternate jerseys but we need to keep them feeling special. I do not want an entire league of Oregon Ducks, where every time I turn a game on I’m briefly confused as to who is who.

Okay, with that rant out of the way, let’s nitpick the actual rivalry uniforms.

ARIZONA CARDINALS
Someone mentioned they look like tortillas. I find it hard to disagree, but I might be a bit contrarian here and say I like these? Mostly? This might be the first off-white uniform variant that Nike has made that I feel good about. There’s almost a military camo feel to it (especially with the shoulder patch), but not a hard full camo. I love the textured white helmet, it looks like the vanilla ice cream you can buy that has the small black specks in it. I’m not a huge fan of how they shadow gradiented the bird logo on the helmet, but the colors and texture? I like it. We’ve never had a camo texture style to a uniform before and I think this works. I do not think the dirt specks are going to be particularly visible or annoying on TV from wide angles. I do want to give the Cardinals shit for having a uniform release video be color tinted hard orange so you can’t get any idea of how the uniform actually looks. Fire the PR guy. Here’s a decent picture without the tint. Yeah. I like it.

SEATTLE SEAHAWKS
It’s just a fucking Ducks uniform. However, they finally got a two tone helmet right! It has the sheen of an oil slick, and I think it looks awesome. Everything else? Eh. I don’t hate it but I’m not hankering to buy one, you know?

LOS ANGELES RAMS
Deeply uninspired. It looks like they just took the blue home uniform and made it black, including the helmet. Boring. Gimme a piss yellow version.

SAN FRANCISCO 49ERS
Another black alternate, but I think this one is an upgrade! That old-time fancy font looks gorgeous, and the gold outline make this a significant improvement on the prior extremely boring black alternates. I still find black alternates uninspiring, but man, they finally made one I can get behind. I absolutely love that gold outline font.

NEW ENGLAND PATRIOTS
I like this one. I wish it had a little more red, because it kind of looks like the Colts without any, but overall I think this is just fine. The denim jeans color works. The sharp shoulder stripes are a bit too much but I can dig it. The numbers look great. I’m not fond of the giant NE on the shoulders.  This is a solid modern uniform. Passing grade.

NEW YORK JETS
It’s like they didn’t want to do a full black alternate so they just cranked down the saturation and luminosity on the green uniform until it’s almost black but still green. I have the exact opposite reaction to these numbers compared to the last two. I hate that number font. I also don’t care for the busy steel plate texture of the shoulders. I don’t know if I’d call this one a miss, it is interesting and kinda fresh, but I don’t know if I like it. I might need to see this one in motion.

MIAMI DOLPHINS
I swear I am going to find whoever in the Nike design department loves black uniforms so much and kidnap them and torture them until they learn other colors exist. This one is better than the Rams but not by much. At least it looks like a new design and not just a blacked out version of their old uniform.

BUFFALO BILLS
This is just another “whiteout” uniform. I like the shiny icy silver texture on the numbers and the helmet decals but other than that, I don’t have much to say. It’s kinda plain.

My biggest issue with these uniforms is a collective problem. There’s no unifying theme. Rivalries means nothing as a conceptual theme. Color Rush was a theme: colors, saturated as the whole uniform. Throwbacks are a theme. Hell, black alternates and white alternates are kind of a theme. There’s no unifying vision here like there is with the MLB City Connect uniforms (Do a scheme to honor the city of play!). It’s just random ideas for a week thrown together and given the label “rivalries”. The only theme is that the teams will be playing each other in them. It feels like the weakest excuse for alternate uniforms I’ve ever seen.

The results are predictably mixed. The experiment yielded some interesting concepts I would not mind seeing on further uniforms, like the Cardinals textured helmet or the Seahawks iridescent helmet. They finally made a good black alternate. They made good use of some new fonts. They also wasted our time with several black alternates and uninspired choices. But we only got two divisions. That means more are coming. I’m interested to see what’s next.