Sizing up the Cleveland Browns new uniforms

The Cleveland Browns finally unveiled the franchise’s new uniforms Tuesday night at the Cleveland Convention Center.

Frankly speaking, we’re not a big fan of the new uniforms, although we’re relieved because they could have been a whole lot worse.

The Browns will have nine different combinations as they can mix-and-match from a selection of brown, orange and white. Some of the features of the new uniforms, courtesy of the club’s website, include the following (be warned, you’re going to run into some corporate speak):

The city’s name, Cleveland, emblazoned across the chest of all three jerseys, making the Browns the only NFL club to feature its city on the front of the jersey rather than its team name.
Dawg Pound inscribed inside of the back collar of all three jerseys to pay tribute to the NFL’s best fans.
Contrast stitching in the uniform construction that depicts attention to detail and craftsmanship to exemplify the City of Cleveland’s hard-working, blue-collar demeanor.
Larger uniform stripes extending the Browns’ original pattern into a consistent element through the jersey, pants and helmet to represent team solidarity. The horizontal sleeve stripe on the jersey now also crosses over to the chest panel.
Browns’ bold orange helmets also advance the new stripe pattern further with a distinct carbon fiber texture and a new brown face mask, representing the strong, industrious nature of Cleveland.
The team name, Browns, has moved from the jersey’s chest to the pant leg, where it runs horizontally on both sides.

Starting at the top, the helmets look fine, primarily because the team did not add a logo, and the brown face mask is growing on us. As for the carbon fiber texture on the stripe pattern, it is kind of hard to see unless you are up close. Hopefully the defense can give Ben Roethlisberger, Joe Flacco and Andy Dalton and up-close-and-personal look at the pattern come the fall.

Moving onto the jerseys, the white ones are the best and we’re surprised to find that the orange jerseys are not that bad. As always, the white jersey paired with the white pants makes for the best, and only acceptable, monochrome look.

“Throughout the uniform design process, we focused on the core characteristics of our great city — strength and hard work — while also representing the spirit of the city’s recent transformation. We believe these new uniforms reflect those traits while staying true to our history.” – Browns President Alec Scheiner

Here’s the problem, though: because the white jerseys have orange numerals, and the orange jerseys have white numerals, if the club pairs those with anything other than the brown pants they have a very noticeable lack of the color brown. Which is kind of odd, since the team is named Browns after all.

The team could have solved that, and kept with tradition, by adding brown numerals to the white jerseys, but alas.

The brown jerseys are a completely different matter.

For decades the Browns, along with teams like Oakland, Green Bay and Indianapolis, have had one of the most iconic jerseys. Paired with the orange helmet and white pants, the brown jersey was instantly recognizable, even to the casual fan. Now? Not so much.

The orange numbers just don’t look good and we’re not sure what the thinking was here. We get that at one point in the early 1950s the Browns had orange numerals, but some things are better left in the past. The new brown jerseys would be much more palatable if they had white numerals instead of orange. And if someone was committed to adding a drop shadow, they could have still incorporated orange and it would have worked so much better.

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The Cleveland wordmark across the jersey bugs us, too, for reasons we can’t really put our finger on. It’s common in the NBA and Major League Baseball teams to have the city name on their jerseys, but in this case it just feels … forced? We would have much rather seen that element dropped in favor of placing Brownie the Elf over the heart — like you see with team badges in soccer — which would have tied in a beloved figure from the past into the new design.

As for the pants, we definitely could do without the Browns running down the side of the legs. It looks like something you would find on a mid-major college football team and comes across as an element added by a designer who just couldn’t see a blank space without filling it.

If you really felt the need to add something to the pants, a tastefully small logo – Brownie the Elf or the new Dawg logo — on the hip would have been a better choice.

While we’re not overly thrilled by some of the elements of the new uniforms, we’re willing to accept that change is inevitable and we’re just glad that they didn’t come out looking like what they are wearing in Tampa Bay.

The most important thing to remember, of course, is it’s not the uniforms the players wear, but the players in the uniforms that matter the most.

(Photo courtesy of clevelandbrowns.com)

What do you think of new Browns uniforms – are they better or worse than what you expected?

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