Ottawa RedBlacks Unveil Uniforms

The Ottawa RedBlacks, expansion franchise in the Canadian Football League for the upcoming 2014 season, have unveiled their inaugural season uniforms at a fan event held earlier tonight. The uniforms come after a week of teaser images posted on the club’s social media channels.

Fans were quite clear — they wanted a simple, black jersey for home games, like their dearly departed Ottawa Rough Riders and (for the most part) they got just that. The RedBlacks will wear black with a RedBlacks logo on each sleeve, a “RedBlacks” wordmark logo in red and white under the collar.

Up each side of the jersey is a thin red stripe, there is no sleeve stripes but there is a red stripe around the collar. Player numbers are white, italicized, in a font styled after the wordmark logo. Helmet is a plain black shell, no stripes, with a black facemask, and the RedBlacks sawblade logo on either side.

The bumper on the front of the helmet will feature the French version of the team logo and read “Rouge Et Noir“. This is to promote the fact the team has two official team names (one in French, one in English), because using a single bi-lingual name would’ve been silly.

On the road we see some creativity come into play.

Jersey is a white base with each sleeve, the collar, and the jersey sides all in black. Numbers are black and red in the same font as on the home jersey. As is the case with the home jersey the RedBlacks saw logo appears on each sleeve.

The helmet is white with the road uniform… for a team named “RedBlacks” I would have expected, say, maybe a red one, perhaps a black one. Certainly not a white one. It’s an interesting choice by the team, and it’s not something I expect to last long.

There are no stripes on the white road helmet, facemask is black.

The all black home jersey and helmet will be paired with black pants. White pants will be worn with the white helmet and jersey on the road.

For the most part I feel the RedBlacks did a good job with their uniform set, I’m really not a fan of that road white helmet, but other than that I can’t complain about what they went with… and for a team which insists their name be capitalized at all times (yeah, we’re not doing that) it certainly should have been a lot worse.

What do you think? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

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All photos courtesy the CFL