Welcome to your weekly look into the world of wardrobe, it's our first in a series of posts giving you the latest news and happenings with sports uniforms over the past seven days.
Kicking things off (pun!) with the NFL, the Chicago Bears and Buffalo Bills both took to the field wearing throwback uniforms on Sundayafternoon, the Bears going back to the 1940s as part of their alumni night celebrations and the Bills just going with their lid from the '60s and '70s.
Chicago's throwback look, which they have worn several times in the recent past, is a plain navy blue helmet - no logo. Like the Bears’ regular home set, the jerseys are blue with orange numbers but in a serif number font and no white trim anywhere to be seen.
The big difference with the Bills is the helmet logo; a stationary red bison replaces a charging blue bison with streak of red. The jerseys do feature some subtle differences in the spacing of the stripes on the sleeves but are largely the same as their regular road white tops.
The old looks worked, both teams won their games by just one point. Yes, even the Bills... for reals.
Week two also saw four teams play the monochrome game, which, as a traditionalist I can't stand. The monochrome look is when a football team wears the same dark colour for their jersey as they do for their pants. There’s no break from uniform element-to-uniform element.
The Kansas City Chiefs went with a head-to-toe red uniform for the first time in their history, the result looked like eleven 300 pound blood-clots in shoulder pads running around on the field. They also won by just one point. Weird ... right?
Joining the Chiefs in the one-colour silliness last week were the Cincinnati Bengals who wanted to go all-black for their Monday Night spotlight against Pittsburgh, the Seattle Seahawks who similarly chose the spotlight (but on Sunday Night) to go with top-to-bottom "College Navy" uniforms, and the Tennessee Titans who, and I'm pretty sure of this, are the only NFL team to ever Smurf-it-up by wearing a white helmet with baby blue tops and baby blue pants in an NFL game as they did this past weekend. It looked Smurfing awful.
Switching to baseball, we had all thirty Major League clubs wearing a US flag patch on the sides of their caps on the 11th in memory of those lives lost during the terrorist attacks in 2001. This simple method of honouring the country, just adding a single flag, was a welcome and much more impactful tribute than the Memorial Day camouflage and white 4th of July stars and stripes patriotic caps worn earlier in the season.
This flag-only tradition in baseball began immediately after the attacks in 2001 when every team wore the flag through to the end of the season. The league has followed up by wearing the flag patch on the 11th from 2002-07, and again from 2011 through today.
The Toronto Blue Jays, the lone non-US team, chose to honour both the United States and Canada by wearing a flag on each side of the cap. Proceeds from the sales of these caps went directly to the various 9/11 memorial museums in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania.
The Arizona Diamondbacks and Chicago White Sox both wore special one-game uniforms, the D-backs joined the list of teams honouring their Spanish fans in 2013 by wearing black tops which read "Los D-backs" for their game against Colorado on Saturday -- these uniforms were auctioned off after the game with proceeds going to the Arizona Diamondbacks charitable foundation. Up in Chicago the White Sox did their annual "Halfway to St. Patrick's Day" event by wearing green caps and jerseys with green pinstripes, logos, player names, and numbers. The Chicago River, however, was spared a dying for this occasion.
An odd sight on Sunday as both the Tampa Bay Rays and Minnesota Twins took to the field wearing navy blue jerseys and caps. Only their pants, grey for the Rays, and white for the Twins, were different. There's really no excuse for this to happen, the Twins have two other home white jerseys in addition to the alternate navy top they chose to wear that day, and the Rays, of course have their standard road greys.
Aside from occurring on a daily basis during Spring Training, this has happened before in the regular season, the Blue Jays and Royals once faced off both wearing almost identical royal blue and white jerseys and caps for a game in Kansas City back in 1995.
NHL pre-season just got underway but we've already got all sorts of uniform news there. The Anaheim Ducks announced that they would be celebrating their 20th anniversary by turning back the clock to 1993 for a game next month. The club will wear their inaugural season Mighty Ducks of Anaheim eggplant and jade Disney-esque road uniforms for the October 13th game against Ottawa. Players from the expansion squad will be honoured before the game and retro scoreboard graphics as well as early 90s music will be played during breaks in play. Sounds like a damn good time.
Elsewhere in the NHL, the Dallas Stars and their brand new green-and-silver identity took to the ice for the first time on Sunday – this is the first time in the 47-year history of the Stars/North Stars franchise that the team has NOT worn yellow or gold on their uniforms.
We learned that the Calgary Flames will be unveiling a new alternate jersey in the coming weeks (hopefully better than Buffalo's new one) and that the New York Islanders will NOT be changing their name to Brooklyn when they move to the Barclays Center in 2015 -- they will, however, have a Brooklyn themed alternate jersey when the time comes.
We end things off with some NCAA football where Nebraska held a "Black Out" game on Sunday in which their players ditched the familiar Cornhusker red for black tops with stenciled white numbers. The Oregon Ducks, always one to wear something worth mentioning, went for the all-yellow look. That's a yellow helmet, a yellow jersey, and yellow pants. Indeed.
That's it for this round; check back next Tuesday morning to see what ended up happening in the week to come.