My continuing hard hat project (see Archives, "Gene Upshaw and the love" or click here) had me on e-bay this morning following the commissioners sage advice to add a green NFL communications sticker to the back of said brain bucket. As it turned out I found a package deal that included the NFL logo, American flag, communications decal and a Super Bowl logo from last year. The SB logo I could do without  but it’ll help on the one item I do enjoy overpatching… my guitar case. The others will come to good use. As an extra added bonus the seller would ship international, saving me the trouble of buggin’ someone to forward them to me. It doesn’t take much to make me happy, but my joy was short lived.
 While perusing e-bay for the decals I happened across some helmets people have presumably  put together helmets themselves and I spotted something that made my skin crawl and caused me to break out in a cold sweat. I saw some of them using the neck bumper sticker/logo on helmets that have no neck bumper. See examples below… this is a clear violation of both the letter and the spirit of the law and must be stopped at all costs as it threatens the very fabric of fashion society. Perhaps a government buyout of these toxic fashion assets is in order…

I had originally started clicking on these helmets for sale to get the basic info on placement of the decals but soon realized that in perusing home-mades I was slogging through the Wikepedia of football fashion where chaos ruled, anarchy prevailed and infractions both heinous and egregious went unchecked, unnoticed and uncorrected.

So I went to NFL.com photo galleries to check on decal placement on the back of the helmet. However, even here there was much variation depending on whether the team has back of helmet numbers or not. As an aside I noticed a direct correlation between the width of a teams center of helmet stripe(s) and the likelihood of having helmet numbers. But I digress…
Generally the NFL logo and any memorial decals are placed on the left and the American flag on the right. The flag on some helmets even without numbers seems placed kinda high and the NFL logo is placed wide out from the center stripe on others. I can only guess that the NFL shield has been placed wide to accommodate future memorial stickers since someone connected to the team is likely to go to the great gridiron in the sky in any given year. I understand it but can’t say I’m crazy about making memorial stickers a permanent feature as it’s a slippery slope that could lead to having a memorial sticker for the guy who used to put the memorial stickers on the helmets before he succumbed to some exotic disease related to overexposure to the chemicals used in decal manufacturing.

In the course of my research I also noticed that the really wide stripe models of the Dolphins and Bills leave little room between the stripe and the back end of the side of helmet logo and they come dangerously close to overlapping. Perhaps the trolls slaving away in the fashion dungeons should send a memo to the muckety-mucks upstairs to consider some resizing.

Moving on…

The big story inside the big story of the 50th AFL anniversary throwbacks, at least according to the eminent Epstein, is that the Jets/Titans will indeed be wearing not only the Titan home Jersey that debuted recently but when they play on the road they'll be sporting the Jet/Titan away whites that this enterprising fashion reporter tracked down last season when the issue was raised. Wow!

As you can see it’s reminiscent of the Vikings away Jerseys of the Sixties and Seventies but also sports long sleeves with those neato-torpedo around the wrist cuffs.  I want one bad.

This pic shows Rex Ryan holding the Titan home jersey. The whole thing is a mega-thon fabu-licous extravaganza but as usual I we do have a bone to pick. Look at the patch on the titan jersey and the raider jersey and well, almost all of them. Except for maybe on the Pats and Chiefs jerseys, the patch just looks really out of place. Wouldn’t it be better if they left the patch off the throwbacks? I mean hell, the throwback uni’s are enough of a huge giant billboard announcing the celebration of the anniversary, no? Couldn’t they just wear the commemorative patch for the other games of the year when they have their current uni’s?

Can I get an amen?

Ken