The Philadelphia Eagles have announced their long-awaited kelly green throwback jerseys and helmets. Everyone is very excited about this, and why wouldn't they be?
The Eagles will wear these alternates only twice this season. That's bad, and sort of inexplicable to me. If you have a great uniform, and you choose to wear it only as an alternate, you may as well be choosing not to wear it. Instead you are choosing this:
Why would you decide to look like that when you could look like this, all of the time?
Thesis: If a team has a good uniform in its history, it should wear the good uniform instead of a bad uniform. I do not think this is controversial. The Eagles should make kelly green their official, full-time uniforms, because they are good, and the midnight green ones are not. Do not make them "throwbacks" or "alternates"—just make the good uniform your uniform.
Owner Jeffrey Lurie switched to the bad uniforms in 1995, a year after he bought the team, because he and his wife didn't like kelly green. But the Eagles clearly know that their good uniforms are good, and everyone wants them. They wore kelly green throwbacks once before, in 2010, with special permission for the team's championship 50th anniversary (pictured at top). They have been trying for years to get approval to wear them, and only the new league rules allowing alternate helmets have allowed them to do it right. But 2010 was a long time ago. In the intervening 13 years, they could have just made kelly green their actual uniform.
Teams love wearing bad uniforms when they could wear good uniforms. They love it! The Atlanta Falcons are planning to wear their throwback unforms, complete with red helmets, three times this season, after the overwhelmingly positive response to the single game they wore it last year. The franchise had red helmets until 1990, but has gone with black since then. Again, this is an instance of a team actively choosing to look like this...
...when it could look like this.
I do not think this should be complicated, and yet many teams continue to get it wrong. The New York Giants will look like this for most of this season...
...but look like this for only two games:
If a team currently has a good uniform, it should continue to wear it. If a team has never had a good uniform, I understand why they wear a bad one. But if a team has had a good uniform, it should wear that uniform, not in addition to the bad one, but instead of it.
