It seems to be the tradition in the NHL, mlb, the NBA and college basketball for the home team to wear either white or light colored jerseys, while the visiting team wears dark/colored jerseys. But in college and pro football the reverse seems to be true.
Are there actual rules for which team will wear light/dark jerseys dependign on if they are the home/visiting team?
I don’t know if there are rules about who will wear what, but I BELIEVE that the home team generally gets to choose.
In football, it’s an advantage to wear dark colors, because it tends to hide who is carrying the ball better than a white shirt.
At one time football followed the same formula, that the home team wore white jerseys. Somewhere along the line, the present system started, in which the home team gets to choose whether they wear their white or colored jerseys.
Most teams choose to wear their colored jerseys, so the visitors usually wind up in their white jerseys. There are exceptions, like the Dallas Cowboys, who choose to wear white. Consequently, Dallas HAS colored jerseys, but you seldom see them - they only wind up in them when they have an away game against another team that chooses to wear white at home.
There is a rule (or was) in Major League Baseball that the home team must wear a white uniform. Traditionally, the visiting team wore grey. Starting in the 1970s, visiting teams began wearing other colours, but never white. By the end of the 1990s, home teams also sometimes wore coloured jerseys, but always wore white pants. I don’t know whether there was any official change in the rulebooks, but in practice it seems that in Major League Baseball, the only rule is that the visiting team may not wear white.
Quite true- but you may recall, at one time, rumors abounded about the Cowboys having a blue jersey “jinx.” That is, their record when wearing blue was MUCH worse than when they wore white (not surprising, really- they only wore blue jersey on the road, so you’d EXPECT their winning percentage to be lower!).
So, for many years (mainly in the 70s and 80s), teams that NORMALLY wore dark jerseys at home started wearing white jerseys, to force the Cowboys to wear those “unlucky” blue jerseys!
In the NHL, it used to be the rule that the home team would wear coloured jerseys, and the visitors white. They reversed it some time in the seventies. The thinking was that it would be more fun for the spectators to see all the various colours of the visiting teams, intead of just the home team colours.
Now, while I might be new to this message board, I’m an avid fan of sports. At first, everyone wore the same color jersey, as you can see in old football pictures. Very little variation, if any, on them. Then, once the sport got big and began being filmed for a wide audience, they had to have a way of telling the two teams apart, so they had one team wear white jerseys and one a dark colored jersey. Since football is usually played in the mud, or was, before the high tech surfaces like “artificial grass” came into play, as well as mostly in the winter, they wore the dark jerseys for heat, I would assume. Now, baseball, back in the early days, had all dark jerseys at home and on the road. They wore the same ones, but soon they found that the fans were having difficulty telling the difference between the teams playing (which also resulted in numbers being placed on the backs). Baseball is played in the summer, so naturally you’d wear white instead of black or gray, thus giving you an even bigger home field advantage. Or, I could be totally wrong and just be ranting about little consipiracies that are forming in my head about road and away jerseys. Either way, that took a long ass time to type.
In college football, the home team is required to wear dark uniforms unless it receives permission from its opponent to wear white uniforms. The most notable team to wear white at home is LSU. Occasionally, a team with a grudge against LSU won’t agree and the Tigers wear purple.
In the NFL the home team gets to decide what color jerseys to wear. You might have noticed that last week several of the home teams (Cleveland for example) wore white because of the heat. The Bears, for some strange reason, decided to go ahead and wear their navy blue jerseys in 100 degree weather. I’ve been confused over this for the last week. What were they thinking? Big Ted Washington could have used any break from the heat he could get, yet the Bears still wore dark jerseys.
In baseball there are “third jerseys,” I’ve also heard them called “Sunday afternoon” jerseys. Usually the starting pitcher for the home team picks what jersey to wear. It seemed to me that the Cubs would usually wear blue jerseys when Jon Lieber was pitching (though it could have been my imagination) and they would wear their home white pants with blue pinstripes.
Were they playing in direct sunlight? In the shade, darker colors are actually cooler.
Not all major league baseball teams have a third jersey. For instance, the Cardinals put up a big explanation on their web site a few years ago just to have a third cap, and felt the need to justify it with historical precedence. I don’t think their core fan base likes the idea of them acting trendy like the Mariners, etc.
An earlier thread on this topic: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?&threadid=42940
From the official rules of Major League Baseball –
Also, baseball clubs developed originally from gentlemen’s clubs in the 19th century. Back then, it was the rule that gentlemen always wore white for athletics (cf. cricket, tennis), so originally, all baseball teams wore white, probably with slightly varying trim. Different coloured uniforms for visiting teams developed later.
Going way back into the football dark ages, in the Big Ten before the advent of television the schools wore their colors. This caused no confusion because, Michigan, for example wore blue and maize while Purdue wore black and gold. If there was a clash, as when Iowa played Purdue, both being black and gold, Iowa would wear gold and black as visitors.
However, with black and white TV the Purple of Northwestern didn’t stand out from the Red of Wisconsin so some time in the early '50’s the Big Ten went to the school colors for the home team and white for the visitors. And I think others changed over at about the same time, probably at the insistance of the broadcasters.