Why I hate it when the Packers wear white at home

I suppose the Dallas Cowboys are all really to blame for this.

I’ve made my disdain for wearing white uniforms at home into a bit of a running bit on Blue 58. “If you wear white at home, you deserve to lose,” I often say. And I believe that! But…why? How did I land on that position?

LIke I said, the Cowboys. More specifically, the Packers’ tendency to play the Cowboys in Dallas. I don’t have the exact numbers, but I think between around 1993 and 1999 or so, the Packers played the Cowboys about 36 times, and I think all but one of those games happened in Dallas.

And, as you know, the Cowboys like to wear their white jerseys at home.

Note that I did not say “they wore their road uniforms at home.” I know that there’s a difference between the way the Cowboys style their uniforms at home and what they do on the road. I don’t care to enumerate those differences, but I know they exist.

This irked my pre-teen brain. Everyone knows that a team’s home uniforms — the uniforms featuring their primary colors most boldly — look the best, and you want to wear those at home because you want to look your best for your home fans, right? Right?!

Why did the Cowboys not want to look their best at home? Why did they want to look bad and lame in front of their home crowd? I viewed this as bad and shameful, which is the correct opinion of everything related to the Dallas Cowboys.

But this stance solidified in my brain on a specific date: September 8, 2003. That was the day the Philadelphia Eagles hosted the Tampa Bay Buccaneers for the first-ever regular season game at Lincoln Financial Field. And in their one opportunity to christen their new stadium, the Eagles chose to wear their all-white ensembles.

They lost 17-0, and I felt cosmic justice had been served. This neatly coincided with the time in my football life when I was first getting into uniforms seriously, so “white at home is bad” took hold in the core of my being the way these sorts of convictions do when you’re young.

If you wear white at home, you deserve to lose.

I don’t have hard data on this, but I think “white at home” has only proliferated since that time. I don’t know if it’s true, but it feels true that more teams are wearing white for their home games, including the Packers on Sunday.

This is probably due to changing uniform tastes, both among fans and among players. “Clean” and “fresh” seem to be the most popular descriptors for uniforms these days (gosh, I must be old if I’m writing things that sound that old), but I also blame the NBA.

A few years ago, the NBA did away with home and road distinctions for uniforms entirely. Teams now just need to coordinate and make sure that they’re wearing contrasting colors. That’s fine from a visual perspective, but I miss the uniformity of knowing at a glance who was playing and where just by seeing the colors on the screen.

I think the NFL is headed the way of the NBA, especially after the proliferation of alternate uniforms after the NFL repealed its “one shell” rule. I think there’s a day in the not-too-distant future where there will no longer be home and road uniforms in the NFL. We may functionally be there already.

But that doesn’t change anything for me. I still think that if you wear white at home you’re not taking the chance to look your best, and if you’re not going to bother to look your best, you deserve to lose.

Maybe I just want the Cowboys to lose all the time.