Hot or Not?: Ravens Unveil New Uniforms
- Eric Lyons
- Apr 17
- 2 min read
By Eric Lyons
Last night, the Baltimore Ravens unveiled their brand new uniforms. Touted as the ‘Next Flight’ collection, unfortunately, the new threads didn’t stick the landing. These new uniforms are absolute trash. The Ravens have parodied their own identity and turned themselves into an imposter. Baltimore Ravens? More like the Loch Raven Ravens. The problem with most of these new uniforms is that they fall victim to minimalist culture. The simplification of logos, fonts, and color schemes continues to do damage to NFL uniforms.
The Baltimore Ravens were one of the NFL teams with classic-feeling uniform designs. A look that represented the city of Baltimore with its own unique look. Now they blend in with the rest of the league. The numbers lost their 3D font and gold trim, leaving them looking soulless. There’s nothing behind those new numbers, no history, feelings, memories, just a corporate creation. Change is not always a good thing, no matter how well they try to spin it. You can’t serve somebody an oatmeal raisin cookie and then try to make them believe it’s chocolate chip; that’s just nasty. Ravens fans are being forced to eat this Nike slop and are convincing themselves that it tastes good.
Moving up the landscape of these new jerseys, let’s examine the collars. Is this TCU or a professional football team? The so-called winged collars are more reminiscent of the Horned Frogs than the birds that Edgar Allen Poe was speaking to. To take it a step further, they even resemble the stripes on the Bengals' uniforms. It should not be that easy to draw comparisons to other teams when discussing a team's uniforms. The keyword is identity; the Ravens are losing that.
One lifelong Ravens fan said, “When I looked at them, it’s not something I would wear on Friday, but they’ll look tough on the field.” That sounds like someone who is accepting a consolation prize in a contest they shouldn’t have entered to begin with. There seems to be a lot of coping amongst the Ravens fans. Across social media, many of them are picking one thing from each combo that they like. But who likes the entire rollout? Who will be honest with themselves and the rest of the flock? The bottom line is, some uniforms simply should not be touched. The Ravens have lost a piece of themselves in another Nike run-simplification experiment.
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