Being a Browns Fan Means Never Having to Apologize for the Uniforms

These are trying times for the National Football League. There's the fallout from Michael Vick's dog fighting indictment, PacMan Jones's Death Row Records lifestyle, and the criminal conduct of every person on the Cincinnati Bengals roster except the field goal kicker and the team chaplain. Then there's the contribution that Tom Brady and Matt Leinart have made to a disturbing rise in the illegitimacy rate among the "Caucasians earning more than $10 million per year" demographic.

While Roger Goodell is stressing out over these issues, I think that, in the end, all of these troubles are nothing that can't be fixed by a few well placed NFL-United Way ads. I wish the same could be said for an issue that's been bugging me for quite some time, and that's the ongoing uglification of NFL team uniforms. I'm not exactly sure which team started the trend, but there have been several uniform innovations over the past couple of decades that were godawful enough for everyone to take notice, and these seem to have become more frequent-- and more offensive-- in recent years.

The first change that really stands out in my mind was back in 1981, when the Bengals shed the blatant Browns rip-offs they used to wear in favor of a new look that was apparently designed by Tony the Tiger. Things went downhill from there, with carpetbagger teams like the Tennessee Titans and Baltimore Ravens raising the bar for ugliness, and established teams like the New England Patriots abandoning old school uniforms for the downright bizarre (goodbye Pat the Patriot, hello Flying Elvis). The ugliness trend reached its zenith a few years back when the Buffalo Bills unveiled their, ahem, distinctive design.

When I see uniforms like those worn by the Bills and Titans, I have the same reaction that I do when I walk into somebody's house and notice that they've got foil wallpaper in the bathroom. "Gee, they had a choice, and they actually chose this?" Honestly, those teams' two-tone jerseys appear to have jumped straight out of the pages of the 1973 Sears Catalog.

One of the unfortunate things about the NFL is that other teams frequently take their cues from what they see on the field on Sunday afternoons, and the uniform ugliness trend is no exception. The most notable example of this is the University of Oregon Ducks, whose horrific uniforms look like what James Caan wore in Rollerball.

If there's a silver lining in the dark cloud of uniform ugliness, it's that the Cleveland Browns have had nothing to do with it. There have been some bad ideas incorporated into the Browns' uniforms over the years, such as the orange jerseys that made them look like Creamsicles, and the brown socks, which have got to go, but the Browns wear basically the same uniform that they wore in 1952, when they went to the orange helmet full time (it was worn at night beginning in 1950).

Sure, the Browns uniforms are a little boring, and they don't make for real interesting throwback uniform days, but they definitely aren't aggressively ugly. Given what other teams have done with their uniforms, that's saying a lot.