Such a silly question, I was undecided whether to put it here, in IMHO or in Cafe Society. But since I suspect there may be a definitive answer, here we are.
I am curious as to why in pro football (or college football, even, as far as I know), the teams always have 2 colors for the team colors. I can’t think of an example of a single color or 3 colors; it’s always 2.
If I am not wrong in this assumption, why is this? Where did the tradition come from?
(Disclaimer: No bar bets are on this, no one’s reputation is at stake, and if I don’t get an answer, I will still be able to sleep at night.)
High Schools are the same way, with two “school” colors, but it isn’t just for football, it’s for everything. It also helps when you have a lot of schools in a small area: if everyone was just one color, there would be a LOT of overlap, and if everyone was three colors, that would be difficult to remember. Two is just about right.
Sometimes they play teams that have a color in common, so they wear their other color (depending on home or away). It would be confusing to watch schools of the same colors play each other. I wouldn’t know which team was which.
In the case of the Tennessee Titans, there’s a semi-official warning that’s repeated on Titans Radio broadcasts that lists the official colors, and I believe they are Navy, Light Blue, White, Red, and Silver. I have been unable to locate a site where this group is specified, but this picture of the helmet has those colors visible. The silver forms the shaded part of the T and the red stars are within the circle and also form part of the flames. You normally see the team in either Navy, light blue or white jerseys, but the practice squads also include red jerseys.
According to the World Almanac, at least Brown and Harvard have three official colors.
Your point is generally true, I can believe, but there are exceptions.
An issue I have meant to try to find out is which single color is most prevalent. I think besides black and white, that it may be red or one of the many synonyms for red. Blue would be a big contender, too, once you allow all the shades.
When I read the OP I thought it was and and not or. For example, my high shool team colours were blue and gold. The Oakland Raiders are silver and black. The L.A. Lakers are purple (or is it ‘Forum Blue’?) and yellow. The ‘home’ and ‘away’ colours are (or may be – I’m not the world’s biggest sports fan) are reversals. This as opposed to or – say, red for away games and blue for home games.
Come to think of it, all the teams that come to my mind are three colors: Packers are green, yellow, and white. 49ers are red, gold, and black. With the Bears, at least, while the jersey itself is usually only blue and white, they do have an orange jersey they play in at least once a year.
But home and away isn’t really the issue, at least at the NFL level. NFL teams have a set of white uniforms and a set of colored uniforms. Home team (today) gets to choose whether they wear their whites or their colors, and most choose to wear their colors (traditionally, the home team wore white - somewhere along the line somebody realized that this meant the home field fans didn’t get to see their team in their probably more distinctive colored jerseys). Two NFL teams can have the same team colors, with very similar looking colored jerseys, and it wouldn’t matter. They sometimes make exceptions for special games, but if you glance at a regular season NFL game, you will always notice it’s guys in predominantly white jerseys versus guys in colored jerseys. Most of the time, the guys in colored jerseys are the home team, and the jerseys display their team colors. For the guys in white, their pants will be their team colors.
Thanks for the great and interesting answers I’ve gotten so far.
I just wanted to add that sometimes I post a pretty mundane question just because of the variety and, uh, “richness” of the answers the folk here provide. I usually wind up learning things about the subject that I hadn’t even thought about.
This thread is a perfect example of this. Much appreciated and feel free to add any other interesting or arcane data!
Many teams have an “alternate” third uniform that they use only on certain occasions. The Jaguars, for instance, have home teal, away white, or home black that they have worn on certain prime time games.
Pittsburgh has 3 colors, black-gold-white, but only uniforms in black and white. They have designed a gold jersey (mainly to wear when Florida teams wear white at home, forcing the Steelers into their “colored” jersey in the heat), but it was never submitted to the league for approval.
The Oregon Ducks college football team has green, yellow, white, and black jerseys, as well as pants, and I believe helmets in all 4 colors, allowing them a ton of combinations.
Denver generally uses dark blue jerseys (with either white or dark blue pants) at home and white jerseys with blue pants on the road. The only time you see their orange jerseys today is as one of the alternates (and it’s been a couple years since they pulled them out.) Those are more likely to be used A. In snow or B. As part of a throwback uniform, when they’ll also wear helmets with the old logo. I think they last time they wore orange was a very snowy Monday night game against Oakland back in 2004.
Thanks for mentioning Oregon. I have read or heard many references to their being a guinea pig for Nike to experiment with how ugly you can make a uniform. There was even some experimental work with the “toolbox” pattern on the shoulders. I’ve seen that by virtue of their colors they can have 384 color combinations if they so desire.
The 49ers have an alternate gold jersey I don’t think they have ever worn for a game, they only sell it to [del]nitwits[/del] fans.
Hockey also has alternate jerseys, such as the all-black alternates that the Sharks wear on Thursday home games.
Well, from what I can dig up, San Francisco does not have any alternate jerseys, although they have occasionally worn 1989 throwbacks. Apparently, the rules on alternate jerseys are that you can only wear them up to twice a year. For some reason, I thought teams were required to wear their third jerseys once a year to keep them active, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
Conversely to what someone said, I seem to remember that way back when, teams wore their white jerseys on the road and colored jerseys at home. And did not necessarily wear colored pants, even with the white jerseys.
All of this is driven in large part, as the above-cited post tangentially notes, by marketing. About ten (?) years ago, the NFL experimented with the throwback jerseys, and the fans loved them. That seems to have been the jumping-off point for expanding beyond a bi-chromatic set of two uniforms to having lots of variants (in pro and college ball). You don’t need to be a hardened cynic like me to speculate that the prospect of creating new markets for the oddball variant jerseys (which sell for something like $70) is a large driver of this trend.
A friend of mine has the annoying/fight-provoking/funny habit of going up to guys in sports bars and saying: “Oh my God! You’re Wayne Chrebet???” (based on his diktat that “the only time you should wear a jersey with a name on it is if it is your name and you play on the team.”). But the fact that he has so many opportunities to be an ass to jersey-sporting lunkheads says a lot about the market for these things.
