The NFL's Obsession with Jersey Nostalgia
With the proliferation of more looks from the past, are we in an era of poor design or is the power of nostalgia just too strong to overcome?
Fashion is a circle. What fell out of favor will sometimes make a comeback in a slightly reimagined form. In the 90s, wide-legged jeans were everywhere thanks to the popularity of brands like Jnco. What once seemed to be a time capsule of a bygone era has made a comeback with athletes like Shai Gilgeous-Alexander seen walking to games in modern wide-leg pants.
As it is with off the field gear, so it is on the field. The Washington Commanders, Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and other teams have debuted new alternate jerseys this offseason that are revamps of jersey styles that were worn in the 80s and 90s.
What’s old is new again, which raises a question. Is it that these revised older designs are an admittance of a superior design era, or is the pull and power of nostalgia too strong to ignore?
Telling a Historical Story
A mechanism in the unveiling of these jerseys has been a nod to the past, making sure that former generations are remembered. The Commanders new jerseys are an ode to their Super Bowl teams from the 1980s and 1990s. The Miami Dolphins have done a similar tact, releasing throwback jerseys that harkened back to the Don Shula era, where the team famously achieved a perfect season in 1972.
Some of the jersey decisions don’t have a championship call back but rather acknowledge the history of the team. The Tampa Bay Buccaneers have leaned into this with their road “Creamsicle” jerseys. The Buccaneers wore these jerseys from 1976-1996, which was notably a terrible stretch for the franchise as they only made the playoffs three times. But the old-style pirate logo and the color scheme was always a fan favorite, necessitating its comeback.
Last season the Philadelphia Eagles and Seattle Seahawks both featured throwback jerseys with lighter shades of their green and blue colors. The looks brought back memories of Randall Cunningham, Warren Moon, and Steve Largent and presented an opportunity for additional merchandise revenue with their retro logos.
There are many other teams that have brought back their throwbacks in recent years including Denver, Tennessee, and the New York Giants. In almost every instance (the notable exception being the Giants “Century Red” jerseys from last season), the reception has been positive, with many fans advocating that the retro jersey be adopted as the full-time look for the team. It’s a tendency that we have seen before: sports fans are largely more design conservative than we may think.
If It Isn’t Broken...
If you polled college football fans about the best college jerseys of all-time there is a recurring theme. Teams like Ohio State, Michigan, Penn State, Texas, Notre Dame, and LSU are often mentioned. Those teams all have classic looks that have largely remained the same for decades. You would be hard-pressed to find much difference in the looks between Vince Young’s Longhorns and Arch Manning’s Longhorns—and that’s the point. The looks are consistent, associated with success, and as a result, timeless.
The Oregon Ducks, by contrast, are often considered polarizing because they have so many different uniform variations and styles. Their looks are often considered a gimmick and a recruiting tool with unproven effectiveness. This shift in opinion reinforces just how tradition and structure define football fandom. The same logic applies to NFL jersey design.
Almost any modern jersey redesign in the NFL is widely considered a terrible idea by fans. To see this in action, look no further than the multiple iterations of the Jacksonville Jaguars. The Jaguars debuted in 1995 with jerseys that featured a full jaguar body that were well received when they were brought back as a throwback recently.
After 2008, the team decided to go in a different direction with a thin line from the chest around the lower back. This sort of design was popular in colleges at the time, and it was an effort by the Jaguars to modernize. They were mostly unpopular and shelved after three years. Then the team played with helmet colors, debuting a gradient that went from black to gold and offered different shades depending on sunlight. It was a unique innovation but once again it was panned as an ugly gimmick.
The team’s current threads remove extra piping and gradients, with a simple number design devoid of extra design flourishes. If you thought that this minimalist approach would appeal to the masses, you would be wrong. Because these also have been maligned as being too simple and befitting of a high school team. It seems that no matter how they try to modernize, they are doomed to fail. (See the full history of the Jaguars uniforms HERE).
It's not just the Jaguars, it seems that any time a team unveils a new look that isn’t a nod to the past, they are criticized. When the Detroit Lions unveiled a black alternate uniform, many fans called it a “Carolina Panthers rip-off”, yet those same fans love when the team trots out in their throwbacks from the 1940s on Thanksgiving. When the Atlanta Falcons unveiled a gradient design, it was also ridiculed. But the love for their 1990s black throwback persists. While some of these are design preferences, is it also fair to say that we are simply obsessed with nostalgia when it comes to jerseys?
The Love of Nostalgia
We live in day and age where we have transitioned from one major milestone historical event to another. As someone that was born in the late 1980s, I have lived through multiple wars, a recession, an insurrection, and a pandemic before the age of 40. Many people my age and younger have had to adapt so many times, and it is exhausting.
Football is one of those things that is meant to be a constant relief from the strain of reality. It’s a moment of escapism where we can watch the team that we have always rooted for without being reminded of how much the world has continually and mercilessly changed. The modernization of jersey design ultimately conflicts with that brand of escapism.
Nostalgia in football is captivating in a way that many other sports cannot match. In many cities in America, it is steeped in tradition and the passing down of stories and legends. Families for generations would either tailgate, attend games, or watch said games in the same manner every Sunday for years. When I lived in Detroit, a friend of mine held parties every Sunday to watch the slate of games in all three time slots. That sort of built connection just isn’t possible with most other sports.
It is that same tradition, however, that makes us prisoners of nostalgia in a way. We will often think of the “good old days”, when players were true gladiators and not the caricature of money-driven mercenaries that many think of today. This romanticism with the past then lends itself to valuing the looks of the past as the only ones that make sense.
While jersey critiques are present in other sports as well, they don’t feel as universal as they are in football. The result has been that teams have leaned further into looking like they did in the past. They are moving away from experimentation and instead playing it safe with designs that they know will be positively received on social media and ensure maximum jersey sales. Or at the very least be inoffensive enough to simply merit a “meh” reaction (no reaction is better than a negative reaction after all).
The result of this will be more teams leaning into the retro aesthetic as a safe place for fans, feeding into the craving of nostalgia. The Commanders, Buccaneers, and Chargers have all fallen into line with this thinking this offseason. Last season, the Jets and Jaguars dipped into nostalgia with great fanfare. The Lions, Broncos, and Texans on the other hand, went with new designs that were widely polarizing.
Could the lesson be for team uniform designers that experimental designs are bad? If that is the result, then we will be entering an era of uninspired regurgitation of what has always worked. In that sense it is the home appliance model entering a space where design and creativity should be celebrated.
Uniforms present an opportunity to tell the story of a team, its fans, and the city it plays in. Continuing to play it safe with a known commodity feels like a disservice. There is some hope, however. In the 2025 season, the NFL and Nike are launching the Rivalries Program, a concept similar to the City Edition and City Connect jerseys in the NBA and MLB respectively.
These jerseys will attempt to celebrate the culture of the cities through jerseys starting with teams in the AFC East and NFC West. These uniforms present an opportunity for creativity that has been lacking with NFL jersey design. We can only hope that they will push the creative boundaries instead of being bound by the intoxicating constraints of nostalgia.