When ancient Roman gladiators entered the Colosseum, the first thing you’d notice was their uniforms. Far from sporting the simple plate bronze that we’ve come to associate with antiquity, elite gladiators were adorned with bright clothing, ornate plumage, and decorated helmets. Each fighter sported unique equipment that distinguished them from their opponents, helping to construct the identity of each individual fighter and making every match more interesting to watch. The gladiator’s attire served a vital role in accentuating the drama of his struggle. Rather than showing off the pure skill of its combatants, the ultimate aim of the gladiatorial games was to entertain a Roman audience, a task that a fighter’s clothing helped him accomplish effectively.
The gladiators of today are not so different.
The game of American football features far more artifice than it is often given credit for. The vast complex of rules and regulations that govern modern football is ultimately only structural support for the theatrical essence of the game. After all, it isn’t the reliable running back or the accurate extra point kick that makes sports headlines—it’s Saquon Barkley hurdling backward over defenders, Jayden Daniel’s last–second 52–yard Hail Mary against the Chicago Bears, Chris Godwin losing it all to a last–second tackle that took him out for the season. Football thrives off of trick plays, miraculous comebacks, and all the other emotional highs and lows that come with watching your team fight for its survival in a cruel and hostile league.
More than pure combat or spectacle for its own sake, football done right is a dramatic art—and what good is a play without costumes for its actors? A good uniform is everything in football, and the NFL understands this well—every team has codes that govern what colors they can and can’t wear, and players are constrained by a long list of regulations that go from restricting font sizes for names on jerseys to prohibiting exposed ankles. These uniform policies are stringently enforced, with players receiving fines for wearing unauthorized bandanas, visors with too dark a tint, or even just the wrong color of socks. The construction of the perfect uniform leaves no room for guesswork—the hearts and minds of America hang in the balance.
The form and the function of modern football uniforms are inseparable. While the clothing of generations past—torn–up sweater vests, knit caps, and ill–fitting tights—brings to mind “circus reject” faster than it does “professional athlete”, the modern sport takes itself far more seriously. The once ragtag game of football has been transformed into a science—in sleek polycarbonate helmets and titanium facemasks, today’s football player is nothing less than a bullet made flesh. More than any practical function, however, uniforms also serve a vital psychological role in creating a sense of community. Be it in the stands, the parking lot outside the stadium, or even throughout the city on game day, all it takes is one look at a uniform to know your friends from your foes. But while tradition holds its place, audiences also crave a certain dynamism from their league. Like 32 Ships of Theseus, NFL teams are constantly evolving with player turnover and new strategies—surely their uniforms must change with them. A good uniform must balance innovation and fidelity to tradition as it simultaneously redefines and reinforces a team’s unique identity.
A good uniform is one that goes unnoticed—but a bad uniform will haunt your team for the rest of the season. While you couldn’t be faulted for not remarking on the Baltimore Ravens’ perfectly passable purple garb, the bumblebee uniforms of the 2012 Pittsburgh Steelers burned themselves into the minds of a generation of Pennsylvania football fans, still occupying space in the discourse today. The fatal errors that most often strike the misguided designer can be separated into two primary categories—hubris and idiocy. Overconfidence is the more forgivable of the two—the high–minded designer, ready to make their mark upon the field, simply throws too much at the wall for all of it to stick. With garish splashes of color and overwrought design elements, these uniforms miss the fact that clothes are meant to accentuate the player, not the other way around.
The New York Giants’ alternate uniforms this year prove this point perfectly, with the jersey’s horizontal stripes and clashing colors making the team look like Christmas elves on steroids. Occasionally, even just one faulty element is enough to throw a perfectly serviceable jersey off track, like the bizarre logo epaulets on the otherwise tasteful (and alluringly retro) New England Patriots jersey of the late ‘90s. But the ambition of these designers should be praised, even if it is a bit misguided—far harder to defend are those uniforms that seem to fly in the face of reason itself.
While I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the Denver Broncos’ “toilet bowls” of the 1960s, a far more recent example of this type of error came during the Color Rush promotion of the 2010s. Rightly recognizing that a team’s identity is most strongly bound up with its colors, the NFL began to market its Thursday Night Football games as matchups between hues, with custom uniforms designed for each team that consisted of a single color and minor accents. While embracing minimalism as a league standard wasn’t a poor idea, its execution left quite a bit to be desired. The dirty gold Jacksonville Jaguars looked like extras in a Mucinex commercial, while the neon green of the Seattle Seahawks was somehow even worse, drawing attention away from Russell Wilson and toward the fact that everyone on the field looked like a human glowstick. More than just failing to represent the spirit of the teams, these uniforms were blights on Jumbotrons and TV screens alike, repulsing viewers nationwide.
The NFL is a league that values incremental reform over revolutionary change—as such, “well–guided” innovation in design is often quiet, cool, and understated. Take this year’s Chargers uniforms; the font choice is classy, the soft powder blues are neither too dark nor too vivid, and the uniform as a whole channels the identity of the team perfectly, making you feel as if you’re watching a lightning bolt made of flesh. A good uniform reminds you of why you’re a fan in the first place, cradling you in familiar colors and symbols while throwing in a few refinements that ultimately serve as compliments rather than disruptions to the status quo. But the best NFL uniforms refuse to be constrained by the paradigm they find themselves in.
The German philosopher Hegel gives us a useful term with “Aufhebung,” which simultaneously carries with it connotations of preservation and advancement. Every so often, a designer will hit the balance just right with a uniform that is Aufhebung incarnate, preserving what gives a team its spirit while also bringing something new to the field. Take the three uniforms of the modern Cincinnati Bengals, all perfect variations on the central theme of the Bengal tiger, sporting claw marks across the shoulders and stripes on the helmet. Whether built upon an orange, black, or white base, the fluid and eye–catching movement of the kit’s stripes as its wearer dashes across the field proves that its creators took the players and their unique activity into account during the design process. The Bengals’ kit is evocative, but not provocative—the alterations it makes upon previous iterations of the team’s uniforms are understated, but serve to both amplify the viewing experience and, on some level, highlight a core aspect of the game of football itself.
Some uniforms, however, are far more outspoken. The neon red of the new Houston Texans alternate uniforms evokes a figure dripping with still–fresh blood—at its heart, football is violence, and statement uniforms like this one drive that home. Watching the Texans take the field clad in their crimson, the message is clear—the stadium is a warzone, and these men are fighting for you. While a jarring shift away from the navy and black the Texans normally sport, the Battle Red uniforms don’t mark an abandonment of tradition. Red has always been a part of the Texans’ color palette, albeit a relatively small one reserved for accents on most uniforms. Inverting its own classical color schema is precisely the Hegelian move that keeps football moving, at once an affirmation of tradition and a supersession of the passé. Its sparing use of the Battle Reds throughout the season preserves the outfit’s subversiveness by marking its use as a “state of exception.” While this could be said about any year’s red Texans uniform, this year’s alt uniform stands out in particular due to the addition of a bull’s horn on both sides of their helmets, a tasteful and innovative callback to the team’s logo.
Sleek and pointed, these horns only serve to underscore the theme of aggression the entire outfit evokes. What chance does the toreador have when the bull itself is red? The good football uniform has a soft touch in channeling its team’s spirit—the great football uniform announces its presence and makes a statement that no audience can ignore.
Why do we bother watching football at all? French literary theorist Roland Barthes once wrote of wrestling that "what is thus displayed for the public is the great spectacle of Suffering, Defeat, and Justice." In the highly regimented world of American football, there is Suffering. There is Defeat. But our national sport makes no such promise of Justice to its audience. Unlike the highly scripted story arcs of professional wrestling, football is ultimately a game of chance—and the odds are pretty good that when you go to a game, you’ll watch a devastating blowout, a career–ending injury, or play so embarrassing you’ll wish they were benched for like (looking at you, De’Vondre Campbell).
But the prospect of disappointment isn’t a bug—it’s a feature. The beauty of football is that it has the potential to evoke the full range of human emotion. While joy and disappointment are offered to the audience in every team sport, there is something visceral in the combat of football, with the pure exertion that goes into every drive and the real physical danger facing each of its combatants, that makes every win more blissful and every loss more painful. The epic highs and lows of American football are exactly what the best kits seek to capture. A good uniform isn’t one that looks good on a stand in the merch shop, it’s an outfit that accentuates the dynamism of the players themselves.
With the immense importance of football and its traditions to the American national spirit, it’s no surprise many teams are unwilling to take risks in their uniform designs. One wrong design choice has the potential to alienate millions—better to stick to tiny riffs on a familiar theme than be labeled the “alarm clock boys” for the rest of your season. But it is precisely these risks that drive the game forward. Not every risk a designer takes will pay off—but those that do offer us a path towards making football just a little bit better. The bitter weight of mindless tradition weighs upon the NFL’s back—it is time for us to shrug it off.
