NFL Uniform Blog

Hi everyone!

In honor of the unfortunate shutdown of the uni-watch website, I have decided I want to start blogging about NFL uniforms. NFL uniforms have been a passion of mine for a long time, and I literally have a spreadsheet of every uniform teams have worn in every NFL game as far back as 2016.

I figured I may as well use my (alleged) autism for constructive purposes and share my uniform opinions with anyone that is interested. So today I just want to make clear what my opinions about uniforms are and show a grading system I will use. I will rate each team’s individual uniform out of 5, and add those up to get the “uniform matchup” score out of 10. The scores are 100% my opinions and are somewhat arbitrary, so I want to just describe what is good in my opinion and what is not.

I use gridiron-uniforms.com very often and will use their images to show the matchups. I also hope to post a weekly blog on Tuesday that will include some live action shots, as a uniform can only truly be judged as to how it looks on the field. Also, I am going to rank the home team’s uniforms BEFORE the road team because they were the team that gets to choose which color uniform they wore, with the road team having to react.

Here are some things I love, and will lead to high scores

1. Contrast. I am not a fan of the jersey and pants being the same color, nor am I a fan of the pants and socks being the same color. It looks like pajamas and anyone doing that will lose points.

2. Striped socks. The vast majority of NFL teams do not wear striped socks anymore, which is unfortunate because the teams that do (Bears, Browns, Chiefs) use them perfectly.

3. Matching striping. If the striping on the shoulders matches the striping on the helmet and pants, it will get more points. If striping is all over the place, you will lose points.

4. Consistency. Teams that consistently wear good looks will end up ranked far higher than the teams that mix and match every single week.

Here are some things I hate, and will lead to low scores.

1. Color on color. This includes both jersey and pants having the same basic color, or the pants and the socks having the same color.

2. Lack of striping. Stripeless pants are a huge no-no. They look like the pants players wear at practice.

3. Getting too cute. If the Green Bay Packers wear an alternate that I don’t like, it will hurt their score more because they are depriving us of their fantastic regular uniforms. Whereas if the Jaguars wear a mediocre alternate, it doesn’t detract as their normal uniforms are very mediocre.

At the end of the day everything is arbitrary, but here is the scale I will use.

Each team will earn between 0 and 5 points for a uniform. The helmet, jersey, pants, and socks will each get between 0 and 1 points. 0 means it should be thrown in the trash, 0.5 means it is mediocre, and 1 means it is good. These 4 points will be added together with a fifth “wild card” point, which can be literally whatever I want. This allows me to take points away for a bad combination of a good uniform, or to give a full point for a set that is more than the sum of its parts.

Let’s do an example from last year’s Super Bowl. Which is going to be a bad example because I didn’t like the uniform combinations at all

Patriots Uniform: Helmet 0.5, Jersey 0.5, Pants 0.25, Socks 0, Wild Card 0

The helmet is fine, the jersey is fine, the pants lose points for being same color as the jersey and the socks get no points for being solid and being the same color as the jersey and the pants. I also didn’t like that they wore white despite being the designated home team (which they rarely do) and they chose it with the worst possible below the belt combination with zero contrast.

Total: 1.25/5

Seahawks Uniform: Helmet 1, Jersey 0.8, Pants 0.5, Socks 0, Wild Card 0.75

I love the Seahawks helmet, the jersey is good not great, the pants lose points because they are the same color but I’ll give them a 0.5 for a good and unique striping pattern. The socks get no points for being solid and the same color as the jersey and pants. The wild card category saves this set some points though as this is in my opinion the best-looking color-on-color worn in the NFL. Also, the Seahawks did not choose to wear Navy, they had to because the Patriots wore white.

Total: 3.05/5

Game total: 4.3/10

I am sure you will realize that these numbers are going to vary week to week for the individual pieces. And I understand that.

I am not doing the preseason, as for some reason a lot of teams (Saints, Lions) wear better uniform combinations in the meaningless games than in the ones that matter.

If you want to hear my opinions on the NFL Rivalries uniform series, I will give a full take:

They suck and the whole thing is a money grab.

Next up, I will be a ranking of all the teams in order based on the uniforms they wore last season, which I hope to have out next week.

Thanks for reading!