Green Bay Packers Need To Shelve Their Acme Throwbacks

On Sundays I normally join up with my close and extended family and we spend the day doing 2 things: Eating Sunday dinner and watching football. I’m sure that this isn’t a foreign concept for some of you who are reading this.

Anyways, after we got done watching the Atlanta Falcons somehow bumble their way into 1st place in the 1:00 game, the 4:15 game involved the Philadelphia Eagles playing the Green Bay Packers. Normally that’s a great uniform matchup. The Packers have classic uniforms that have stood the test of time, while the Eagles have managed to make Midnight Green, black, silver, and white work together beautifully as a color combo. Unfortunately, we only got one half of that matchup as the Packers decided to go out in the Acme Packers throwbacks.

Now, the main reason why I’m brought up the Sunday dinner with family scenario is because of the reaction that my family had to this game on their TV. This included:

“Hey, who’s that in the blue? That’s Green Bay?!”
“Wow, those pants are ugly. Why are they out there wearing khakis?”
“What’s with that random circle?”
“Wait…is that a green facemask? They’re wearing the same helmets, aren’t they!”

Those are observations that my family made, and for the most part, they really don’t care about this whole uniform racket. Or at least they don’t care until a team comes out with something that is both ugly and half-hearted at the same time. That is when even their sense of uniform fashion is offended, so you can only imagine all of the alarm bells that were going off in my head and I’m sure they were going off in your head as well. Make no bones about it: This is bad.

Thanks to the Packers’ official blog site, we got to see the look on paper as well. It even looks bad on paper!

Now, to be fair, the NFL kind of cut the Packers off from the neck up, here, with that dumb rule that limits NFL teams to only 1 helmet. The concussion problem in NFL is a big one; one that could be catastrophic to the future of the league if they don’t handle things correctly. However, limiting teams to only 1 helmet in the name of player safety is an extremely half-hearted measure when the science behind that theory (that “broken-in” helmets perform better than a new one) is shaky at best. But, the NFL’s bought into that science for appearances, which means that we’ve seen teams like the Buccaneers, Cowboys, Falcons, Jets, Washington, and these Packers have their throwbacks either completely eliminated (in the case of the first 4 teams I listed), or completely nerfed into an ugly look. Honestly, Washington got it pretty badly as well when they lost that revolutionary throwback helmet design in favor of their normal helmet sans stripes, but the Packers throwback look took a huge hit when they lost the brown helmets.

Now granted, that is still not a good-looking throwback uniform (and not all the way accurate, but considering the time that’s passed between now and the time that these uniforms were originally worn, it’s about as close as you can get), but it’s still miles ahead of what you’ve seen above. That yellow helmet sticks out like a sore thumb compared to the rest of the uniform, and then the green facemask is basically the cherry on top of this toxic sundae. Maybe they could have gotten away with something like this in the past, but in the age of HDTV, it’s impossible to overlook.

I hate to sound cliche here, but the Packers really should throw this uniform back into the corner of some warehouse where it belongs. It basically means that the Packers won’t be able to wear any eye-catching throwbacks since they’ve basically had the same uniform design with minor tweaks since the ’60s. But that’s a whole lot better than running out in half-hearted throwback uniforms like they did yesterday evening.

As of right now, this look is basically an anchor on the rest of the Packers’ classic identity, so they should cut that anchor loose so that they can continue to run out in some of the best uniforms in football instead of wearing this junk just to sell a few more jerseys in the name of “switching things up.”