Marketplace of Ideas Blog

Sunday evening, all of us (because, as you know, rooting for the Packers is your civic duty) will sit down to watch the Green and Gold take on the Dallas Cowboys.

And therein lies several tales. You may find this excessively esoteric for your interests, but, as apparently with every other interest, the Internet has several Web sites focusing on the minutiae of sports uniforms. Sports uniforms are featured in a daily blog and an ESPN column, Uni Watch, whose author proudly admits he “obsesses over sleeve lengths, sock stripes, and other uniform minutiae.”

This minutiae plays itself out in clothing stores across the U.S., including, of course, the Packer Pro Shop. Sports leagues have strict rules about teams’ uniform designs (which are usually up to the team — the strictness comes in the lack of leniency on variations), going down to, in the NFL’s case, the fact that players have to wear the same color shoe and have to wear socks with the correct amount of white and the correct amount of color. That is why, although you are able to purchase a gold or black Packers jersey, you won’t be seeing the Packers wear either. (Thank heavens.)

Every time an athletic team changes uniforms, it generates two different groups of sales — purchases of the new design, and purchases of the old design by those who either prefer the old design to the new, or prefer the prices of the old design to the new. The NFL requires 18 months of advance notice and, of course, approval before a team can redesign its uniforms. The Milwaukee Bucks went back in 2005 to their original green and red colors, which they are reportedly required to keep for at least seven years.

The variation on a uniform redo is adding an alternate, or “third” (as opposed to home colored and white away), jersey, such as the Brewers’ dark blue jersey. This trend started with the Oakland Athletics, whose flamboyant owner, Charles O. Finley, changed the team’s colors to kelly green, wedding gown white and Fort Knox gold, with jerseys and pants to match. The Houston Astros, perhaps uncertain of which colors to choose, chose, well, all of them within the red-to-yellow spectrum between 1975 and 1986, a design referred to as the “rainbow guts” or “tequila sunrise” uniform.

The standard in the U.S. is that, in football, the home team wears the colored jersey, and the road team wears the white jersey. (That’s the standard; the reality is that the home team gets to choose color or white, which is why the Dallas Cowboys and Miami Dolphins often wear white at home.) In most other team sports, though, the home team wears white and the road team wears colored (gray in baseball) jerseys. The National Hockey League has gone back and forth between colors at home, the original and present standard, and white at home. In soccer, instead of having dark and white uniforms, teams have primary and secondary jerseys, the latter of which is worn when the road team’s primary jersey clashes with the home team’s primary jersey.

The Packers have not always been the Green and Gold. For the first 16 years of their existence, in fact, the Packers were the (Navy) Blue and Gold, most likely because their cofounder, Curly Lambeau, attended Notre Dame the previous year, playing for new coach Knute Rockne. The Packers wore navy blue jerseys except from 1923 to 1926, when they had gold jerseys. (More about “gold” later.) Not until 1935 did the Packers wear green, going back to navy blue in 1937 while adding their first white jersey in 1938. (In the old days of football, teams had one jersey, but the Packers added a white one before a Cleveland Rams–Packers game so players wouldn’t be confused by the two blue teams on the field.)

Green returned with new coach Gene Ronzani, who rationalized that he was coaching “the Green Bay Packers,” in 1950, before blue reappeared with new coach Lisle Blackbourn in 1954. Blackbourn, who played football at Lawrence University (navy blue and white) and coached at Carroll College (navy blue and orange) and Marquette University (blue and gold) apparently tried to have it both ways in 1957, unveiling a reportedly “dark bluish-green” jersey. Replacement Ray “Scooter” McLean, who replaced Blackbourn as coach, apparently didn’t have time to put his stamp on the uniforms in the lone season in which, in the words of New York Times sportswriter Red Smith, the Packers “overwhelmed one, underwhelmed 10 and whelmed one.”

The green/blue switching ceased when Vince Lombardi arrived in Green Bay, and the basic look — green or white jersey, gold helmet, gold pants — has stayed the same since then, with the G helmet logo added in 1961.

The uniform aficionados at Chris Creamer’s Sports Logos Community would jump all over me for writing that, because, for one thing, Lombardi’s green and gold changed to this green and gold in 1981. The jersey stripes (from five alternating-color stripes down to three) and neck trim (it grew under Forrest Gregg), jersey numbers (the side numbers went from the sleeve to the shoulder with Gregg), pant stripes (they’ve gotten a lot wider over the year), facemask color (from gray to green under Bart Starr) and shoes (from black to white to now black) have also changed since Lombardi put his sartorial stamp on the Green and Gold — actually now, according to Pantone, the unofficial color definer for printers and clothing manufacturers, “Pineneedle” and “Saffron” in textiles and Pantone 5535C Dark Green and Pantone 1235C Gold in printing. (For proof, look here at the Bart Starr throwback jersey and the current jersey, neither of which are probably 100 percent accurate, but you’ll get the idea.)

“Gold” also needs further explanation. The Packers’ gold (as well as the Minnesota Vikings’ gold) is known informally as “athletic gold,” a non-metallic yellowish-gold. (Athletic gold is what you get by adding a little red to yellow.) This is in contrast to “metallic gold,” with many uniform variants — “Notre Dame gold,” the New Orleans Saints’ “metallic gold,” “old gold” (the Jacksonville Jaguars and Purdue), “Vegas gold” (more brown than Notre Dame gold) and doubtless others.

There are no hard and fast rules about uniform design, but generally, the older or more established the franchise is, the less likely the franchise is to mess around with its uniforms. That list would include the Packers (which doesn’t stop people from suggesting redesigns), whose aforementioned uniform detail changes haven’t gone as far as changing the gold (more on that in a moment), replacing the gold helmets with white or green helmets, or adding a different-color pair of pants. (I would welcome dark green helmets and pants to wear with their white jerseys because the road Green Bay uniforms aren’t green enough, although this might to lead to confusion or accusations of copying the Eagles).

In contrast, the Milwaukee Brewers started with hasty adaptations of their former identity, the Seattle Pilots, modified it slightly for the doubleknit pullover era, went to pinstripes and the famous “ball-in-glove” logo in 1978, eliminated the powder-blue road uniforms for gray in 1985, returned to buttons and belts in 1990, before redesigning them completely in 1994, followed by another redesign in 2000 (which was supposed to be tied to the opening of Miller Park, delayed to 2001 after the 1999 fatal crane accident during construction). The Brewers’ current uniforms (navy blue and metallic gold) are augmented by a redo of their ball-in-glove-era uniforms (royal blue and athletic gold) in Friday home games.

In 1999, Major League Baseball held a Turn Ahead the Clock promotion in which teams wore uniforms supposedly depicting how they’d look in the 21st century. (Here is the Brewers’ version.) The New York Yankees declined to design new uniforms, saying that their classic pinstriped uniform was in fact their future uniform.

The other direction can be seen in the “throwback” craze, which dates back to either 1994, when every NFL team wore uniforms from a previous era of their history to commemorate the NFL’s 75th anniversary, or in 1990, when the Chicago White Sox held a Turn Back the Clock Day as part of their celebration of their last season in the old Comiskey Park. The ’94 Packers wore 1937 uniforms (or as close as they could get given progress in uniform materials — the throwbacks didn’t extend to leather helmets or canvas pants for obvious reasons), and they wore throwbacks (though not entirely accurate either) to the Glory Years uniforms in the Thanksgiving Day Packers–Lions game in 2001.

One interesting local question on this subject is whether the Wisconsin Timber Rattlers will change their identity if, as has been rumored, the Timber Rattlers affiliate with the Milwaukee Brewers, ending their relationship with the Seattle Mariners. Time was when major league teams’ minor league affiliates simply wore hand-me-down uniforms from the majors, but today minor league teams have their own identities separate from the big club, as you can see by comparing the Rattlers to the Mariners. (The Appleton Foxes did have the Mariners’ colors in their last two years of existence.)

As you can tell by now, teams looking to reverse their fortunes often redesign their uniforms. Wisconsin football coach Barry Alvarez, who played at Nebraska (official colors scarlet and cream), changed the Badgers’ uniforms (whose colors are supposed to be cardinal and white) to emulate Nebraska’s. When St. Norbert College hired a new football coach in 1999, the college’s football uniforms were redesigned to look quite similar to the NFL team that uses St. Norbert as its training camp base. How did that work out? Well, that coach, Jim Purtill, is 85–14 at St. Norbert, although the uniforms now look less like the Packers’ uniforms.

Packers general manager Ron Wolf floated a trial balloon upon his arrival in Green Bay to go back to the Notre Dame-like navy blue and metallic gold. The navy blue idea sank like a rock, but the Packers were ready to switch golds (the result of which might have looked something like this) until Wolf changed his mind at the last minute.

“I never liked the yellow color in the Packers scheme," Wolf told the St. Petersburg Times in 2003. “NFL books say it’s ‘green and gold’ but anybody can see it’s a Michigan kind of yellow, or maize, which didn’t sit well with me.”

But then, Wolf decided, “We needed to fix what was truly broken. What we really had to have was better people on the field. We got lucky and pulled off a deal to get a killer quarterback, Brett Favre, from Atlanta. We got better and better. We did okay in those green and yellow uniforms.”

As for Sunday’s opponents, they are assigned to their own level of uniform aficionado hell because, to the purists, their uniforms are a color mess, with two different blues and three different silvers. The Cowboys started life with royal blue and white uniforms, adding something called “metallic blue” in 1965. The Cowboys have worn white almost all the time at home since 1965, thus leading to the creation of the blue uniform curse, in which home teams would wear their white jerseys, forcing the Cowboys to wear their (allegedly unlucky) blue jerseys. Uniforms are not supposed to cause losses, but note that the Cowboys wore those blue jerseys in Super Bowl V and the 1980 NFC championship game, both Cowboys losses.

So for 1981, the Cowboys switched their road (that is, dark) uniforms, going from royal blue to a darker blue and a shade of silver different from their “metallic blue.” (Which got them to the 1982 NFC championship game where, with this look, they lost, as Packers president Mark Murphy can tell you.) The arrival of Jerry Jones as the Cowboys’ owner in 1989 changed things again, with, now, silver-green for the pants they wear with their white jerseys, silver-blue for their helmets, royal blue for the white-jersey trim, navy blue for their non-white jerseys, and different silver pants to go with the blue jerseys.

Then there is the University of Oregon, whose most famous alumnus is probably Phil Knight, head of Nike. Oregon’s colors are green and gold, similar to the Packers. What Nike and Oregon do with green and gold pushes the envelope, to say the least — mixing green, black, gold and white jerseys; green, gold, white and black pants; green, gold and white helmets; black and white shoes; and black and white socks. (By my count, that’s 192 possible combinations, although Oregon claims “nearly 400” different combinations. So far this season, Oregon has worn all-green against Washington; gold helmets, green jerseys and black pants against Utah State; and white helmets, white jerseys and green pants at Purdue.)

Oregon demonstrates that colleges are leading the way in what some would call “innovative” and others would call “burn-your-corneas ugly” uniform design. Colleges are recruiting both student–athletes and students, and in today’s media-ubiquitous world, whatever stands out, tasteful or hideously garish, wins. In an odd way, the 2000s could be seen as a throwback to the 1970s, when baseball teams, having seen the advent of color TV a decade earlier (that’s how slow baseball usually moves), discovered color as a design element.

I’m not a uniform traditionalist, although Oregon’s aforementioned all-chartreuse look is just wrong. I prefer white shoes to black (which makes the wearers look slow). I don’t believe in adding black (for instance, the Lions) to a uniform when black isn’t part of the team’s color scheme. I hate the Michelin Man look (white jerseys and pants, particularly unflattering to the overweight). Some throwbacks look good, some looked good at the time but don’t work now because of contemporary uniform trends (for instance, nonexistent sleeves on linemen), and others remind you that there are reasons teams changed designs (including the innovation that allowed facemasks to be a color other than gray); neither older nor newer is automatically better. I do not understand teams that create throwbacks to bad eras in their history, such as the Steelers, Eagles and Jets, born as the Titans. And as an announcer, I would prefer a federal law that requires that all teams I’m announcing have names on the back of their uniforms, as well as any game I’m watching in person or on TV.

And you thought Sunday was just about football.

Photos: Society for Sports Uniforms Research, Baseball Hall of Fame, STLToday.com, ESPN.com, Detroit Lions, Sports Illustrated, goducks.com, nmnathletics.com.