I’m spending the days leading up to the Packers’ Wildcard Round matchup with the Eagles thinking about the thing I think about the most: uniforms.

I went down a bit of a rabbit hole before I wrote this piece and it led me to an idea I’ve been circling for a while. In Week 1, the Eagles wore a version of their road uniforms despite being designated as the home team for their international date with the Packers. Ostensibly, they did this to curry some favor with the home crowd at Arena Corinthians, a stadium in which the color green is reportedly banned or partially banned or banned for certain teams. I’m admittedly not sure and I don’t care enough to look it up. The point is, the Eagles wore black helmets, white jerseys, and black pants in Week 1. An alternate uniform, to put it simply.

Today, I idly wondered if they’d do the same thing again in the playoffs, wearing white at home to duplicate at least one part of their performance against the Packers. Knowing that teams sometimes release uniform decisions ahead of time, I did some light googling to see if the Eagles had made any kind of announcement. I didn’t find anything, but did come across this from UniWatch.

The whole piece is worth reading for the uniform-inclined, but the gist of it is this: the Eagles may have technically violated the NFL’s rules regarding alternate uniforms by wearing their all-black ensembles in Week 18. I say technically because part of the conversation hinges on the Eagles making a microscopically tiny tweak to their uniforms last spring, which means they’re technically allowed to do different things with their uniforms because of league rules surrounding redesigns. It’s complicated and finicky and weird, just how I like it.

Anyway, all that led me back to something I’ve been noodling on for a while. I think the NFL by and large has no reason to envy the NBA, but I think they’re jealous of one aspect of the NBA’s current merchandising schtick: essentially unlimited uniforms.

A few years back, the NBA did away with traditional “home” and “road” designations for uniforms, opening the door for teams to trot out uniforms in essentially whichever configuration they liked. This and other similar adjustments have also brought about a proliferation in alternate uniforms, leading to a situation where it’s hard to tell at a glance what teams are playing in a given game. 

Major League Baseball has also dipped their toes into these kinds of waters, introducing the City Connect uniforms that have produced some of the worst designs I think anyone has ever put on a baseball field.

I think the NFL is headed in a similar direction. I think within a few years, we’ll see the NFL relax its rules on home and road uniforms, allowing teams to mix and match uniforms pretty much however they like with no limit to the number of times a team can wear alternates, throwbacks or whatever uniform they like. Indeed, NFL rules already allow the home team to choose to wear whatever they like; it’s only tradition that keeps most teams wearing their most colorful uniforms at home.

We’re at the precipice of an explosion of uniforms, which I’d normally welcome with open arms, but I think the league is going to go about it too willy-nilly for it to make any sense.

I’d love to see a world where teams are limited to a certain number of top-to-bottom uniforms. That is, they’d be limited to wearing uniforms as sets involving a helmet, jersey, and pants. You wouldn’t have teams mixing and matching from a set of differently colored items at each “level” of the uniform. Ideally, you’d have a primary home set (or dark set if you prefer) a road (or light) set, a throwback, and then an alternate.

I don’t think that’s where teams will end up, though. I think we’re going to get a proliferation of helmet shells, jerseys, and pants that teams will mix and match more or less at random leading to less uniform uniformity.

None of this really matters of course, but I prefer a world where the uniforms are, well, uniform.