The Best Players, Not the Best
Uniforms
February 25,
2008 | Kevin
Zdancewicz
While the game
itself is pretty lame and
rather sleep-inducing, one
thing the Pro Bowl does elicit is some, well, interesting uniform
conversation.
The most noticeable element is that players wear their regular team
helmets
with the red, white and blue Pro Bowl uniforms. This causes a lot of clashing,
as
only a
handful of teams use such patriotic colors on their headgear.
The AFC uses red as its dominant color and the NFC uses blue, but
something that
I just learned (because who pays too much attention to the Pro Bowl?)
is that new
uniforms are introduced every two years. That means that the same
design is
used for two straight games and, therefore, this year’s design was also
used in
the 2007 Pro Bowl.
The
2007-2008 concept is featured at the top of the page. They remind
me a little bit of the Atlanta Falcon's design,
with the multiple color panels on the shoulders and the interesting
knee piping.
However, the uniform template is taken up a notch with the additional
side
piping as well as the stars
on the body of the jersey and the pants stripe. It’s not a terrible
design, but
it’s difficult to watch during the game with all the multi-colored
lines and
side panels mixing between the two teams.
The Pro
Bowl uniform concepts are something that no NFL team would
ever introduce, but that’s not much of a surprise since the traditional
gameplan
for the Pro Bowl seems to be to design the craziest jerseys possible.
Actually,
the real mantra seems to be to take the American flag, throw it in a
blender
and design what that might look like on a football uniform. The
2005-2006 uniforms
had a nice layout
but I thought the stars along the sides looked a little tacky. The idea
that
the Pro Bowl should feature designs that teams are too afraid to
implement is
given strong evidence by some of the other jerseys
from years past.
I
hope you enjoyed the game yesterday, that is, if you were able to look
past the
aesthetics to watch it.
Photo
Courtesy of NFL.com
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