Professional Football Researchers Association Forum

Have you ever noticed how the purple in Minnesota Vikings jerseys sometimes looks blue on television, especially under artificial lighting? There's a reason for this, explained here:

https://www.electronicspoint.com/forums ... elevision.

As a kid, I actually thought the Vikings wore a really rich blue on purpose, and I swear at one time you could actually buy Vikings jerseys that looked blue even in person and in natural light.

When the Wilfs took over the Vikings and changed the uniforms, I think they picked a purple that better stays purple on television. Recently, I think it was two years ago, they changed the purple on the helmets to match the jerseys.

What other uniform peculiarities have you seen in professional football?

The Cowboys and 49ers pants always bothered me. The Cowboys wear these ugly seafoam metallic blue/silver pants that doesn't even resemble their helmet color. I think the switch from the Landry/Staubach era gray/silver happened mid 80s. The 49ers pants are a drab tan, not gold.

Here's another one: A few years ago, when the Color Rush thing started for Thursday night football, a lot of teams were switching to wearing dark pants. For whatever reason, the darker pants many teams wore REALLY showed off the sweat marks, to the point where it was just, well, gross. You could see big wet spots in the crotch and rear end. It didn't bother me, really, but my wife would NOT stop commenting on it. Teams still wear dark pants, but you don't see sweat marks like before, so they must have figured out something.

RyanChristiansen wrote:Have you ever noticed how the purple in Minnesota Vikings jerseys sometimes looks blue on television, especially under artificial lighting? There's a reason for this, explained here:

https://www.electronicspoint.com/forums ... elevision.

As a kid, I actually thought the Vikings wore a really rich blue on purpose, and I swear at one time you could actually buy Vikings jerseys that looked blue even in person and in natural light.

When the Wilfs took over the Vikings and changed the uniforms, I think they picked a purple that better stays purple on television. Recently, I think it was two years ago, they changed the purple on the helmets to match the jerseys.

What other uniform peculiarities have you seen in professional football?

I vividly remember the Vikings uniforms in the 1987 strike-shortened season, when the purple in the jerseys was very different than in the helmets (very clear in the NFC Championship game at Washington).

In the early 70s, both the Dolphins and Vikings played with different sleeves in their jerseys in the same games (I think that has been discussed in the forum in the past).

In 1982, the Redskins changed the feather in most of their helmets, but not in all of them (Joe Washington's, for example).

By the late 70s most of the teams with two or more players with the same surname (examples, Cowboys with Danny and Randy White and the Browns with Robert E. Jackson and Robert L. Jackson) had their initials of their name in the back of their jerseys (D. White and R. White, R. E. Jackson and R. L. Jackson). But the Steelers didn´t (Larry Anderson and Anthony Anderson only had Anderson in the back of their jerseys).

I remember the Dallas Cowboys and the Green Bay Packers placed the player's number on the hips of the pants for some reason in the 1980s. I think the Cowboys did it first and the Packers copied a year or two later. They both got rid of the smaller numeral by the 1990s.

I always thought the Vikings' home uniforms looked blue because of the poor lighting in the Metrodome. The purple popped much more when they wore their home unis outdoors.

The 1990 Falcons had uniform numbers in three places- front, back, and right shoulder.

Denis Crawford wrote:I remember the Dallas Cowboys and the Green Bay Packers placed the player's number on the hips of the pants for some reason in the 1980s. I think the Cowboys did it first and the Packers copied a year or two later. They both got rid of the smaller numeral by the 1990s.

From 1982-86, the Colts had pants numbers too but only when wearing the uniforms with blue jerseys.

The 1984 Browns had some weird outline around their numerals, that I don't think they used before or since. The 1984 Bills uniforms also looked weird, and were tweaked a bit so that the Marv Levy Bills uniforms looked a different.