Celebrating the Kansas City Chiefs’ timeless uniforms

A tribute to the Kansas City Chiefs’ timeless uniforms (and the team’s ability to reject today’s marketing gimmicks for the sake of a few bucks).

It’s the most exhilarating period of the NFL offseason when whether or not Landon Collins has cleaned out his locker can become a day-long event of breaking news for Kansas City Chiefs fans hopeful to see him in red and gold in 2019.

We’re still a week or so away from the NFL Combine, where newly-minted Oakland-San Francisco–Tucson-Birmingham–Oakland again-Las Vegas Raiders general manager Mike “Ready For That Jelly” Mayock gets to start forming the Chiefs’ most bitter rival into the NFL’s most bootylicious team. The rest of us will also be overanalyzing Combine data and physical measurements of overstated importance. We will, no doubt, fall in love with some dude who was really, really good at running around cones.

The draft feels like such a random lottery to me. The inexact science of scouting players with zero NFL experience terrifies me, and I’m convinced I’d have better luck a G.M. drafting guys based on who has the coolest name. I watch the draft like any other fan, but breaking down film of some 6th round offensive line prospect out of Tumbleweed State isn’t my strong suit. Arrowhead Addict already has a few obsessives with that particular madness, though, so I’m not depriving anyone of their mock draft fix.

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My brand of madness tends to revolve around either creating narratives or calling narratives that aren’t mine stupid. So while this time of year is like a second Christmas for those who have terabytes of All-22 film on their docket, it’s whatever the opposite of Christmas is for me. The Chiefs are great and are likely to have a drama-less offseason filled with quality free agent signings and logical draft picks. Good for me as a fan, not so much for me as the story-obsessed dweeb. Can’t just one of you Chiefs go on a Twitter tirade or talk a bunch of trash about players from other teams? I need some material, here.

All this is to say this offseason lull is allowing me to dip into a well that only I and a very small percentage of sports fans care about almost as deeply as the sports themselves: the uniforms.

I am irrationally picky when it comes to sports uniforms—from the color scheme to the logo, from the fonts to the accents. It all matters to me way, way too much. One of the things I appreciate most about the Chiefs organization is their commitment to tradition in the face of many teams undergoing radical uniform changes.

Nike has a long history of breaking the mold in athletic design without sacrificing, you know, looking good. That’s almost entirely out the window with their frequent redesigns of NFL uniforms. Over the last few seasons, when the Kansas City Chiefs played the likes of the Seattle Seahawks, Miami Dolphins, and Tampa Bay Buccaneers, there has been a stark contrast in design philosophies apparent. Nike’s vision seems to be to overly complicate every uniform with gaudy accents, wordmarks, and unique number fonts and stripes that leave a growing portion of the league look like they were dressed by a 12-year-old’s Create-a-Team from those awful Blitz: The League games.

The Jacksonville Jaguars have already ditched their first Nike redesigns (featuring those hilarious two-tone helmets), and the Cleveland Browns are right behind them. Upon their realization of just how disastrous Nike’s vision for NFL uniforms are, it’s obvious that each of these teams are each having their own G.O.B. Bluth (“I’ve made a huge mistake”) moment by their willingness to hit the abort button as soon as possible. The problem is, of course, that they’re ditching one Nike redesign to have Nike create another. In the case of the Jaguars, the request to create something more traditional resulted in a set of monochromatic onesies that have no life or vibrance.

So, yes, I do consider myself a “traditionalist” of sorts when it comes to uniforms, but that really only extends to the limiting of superfluous detail. I’m all for unique and daring color combinations. Take the Buccaneers, for instance. Their current uniforms are a near-consensus disaster. Clashing colors and reflective numbers that’d look more at home on a digital clock than a football jersey. The Bucs somehow decided to go with these when they have one of the most gorgeous and original logo and uniform combinations in NFL history with their orange creamsicle sets. When the Arizona Diamondbacks and Tampa Bay Devil Rays entered the MLB in the late 1990s, they did so in a rainbow of purples, teals, yellows, and greens, but kept the construction of the uniforms themselves fairly traditional. I loved it. So there’s plenty of room for experimentation within tradition.

Throughout the late 1990s and into the early-mid 2000s there was an obsession in sports with adding black to teams’ color schemes in the form of additional outlines or drop shadows. Some go as far as to have alternate uniforms that are mostly or entirely black. Every year I’m thankful the Chiefs never fell into that trap. Black works in a uniform, but it has to exist with a purpose—think the Raiders, Baltimore Ravens, Atlanta Falcons, etc.

There has also been a fairly recent tendency in the NFL since the mid-nineties to darken a teams’ colors or “toughen up” their logo—or both—with the Seahawks, Buccaneers, Eagles, Broncos, and Cardinals serving as prime examples. It’s silly. Football is a tough game, and everyone knows it. There’s nothing wrong with being bright and colorful, and it doesn’t make you any less tough to truck through a linebacker while wearing bright orange with Bucco Bruce winking on the side of your helmet.

All these changes were less about trying to shift team culture or perception and more about money. It’s two-fold. Force your fan base to buy new jerseys, then sell them the old ones they liked better as retro throwbacks. Modern rebooted uniforms are constructed specifically to be aesthetically tied to the era they were designed in, so they’ll feel dated faster and necessitate yet another reboot sooner. It’s not about tying a team to a city, it’s about creating a perpetual market for something new.

Which brings me back to Kansas City. The Chiefs have what stand among the NFL’s premier uniform sets. Their road uniforms in particular–the white tops with the red pants–stand at the absolute peak of football fashion along with teams like the Green Bay Packers, Dallas Cowboys, and Chicago Bears. The bright red and yellow pop off of each other in a way that reflects the vibrancy of the Chiefs’ fan base. The logo is simple but iconic, allowing it to stand out in a growing sea of overcomplicated messes.

The changes made over the years have been slight. The logo on the helmet shrunk. Stripes appeared on the arms. More recently, the addition of the Lamar Hunt AFL patch and the moving of the numbers on the arms to the shoulders to account for the modern, tighter uniform fit. Otherwise, today’s uniforms are the same uniforms they’ve always been, and they’ve never felt dated.

Rarely can I be called a romantic, but I do love that Patrick Mahomes is wearing essentially the exact same uniform as Len Dawson. There’s an intangible element within that tradition that roots the legacy of the franchise deeper than it would if the uniforms had changed every 10-15 years with the times. In an NFL that’s never afraid to exploit cynical marketing gimmicks to suck every last dime out of their fans’ wallets, it’s nice to have a few teams that will never have a throwback game because they look the same today as they did five decades ago.