Boomer Esiason advocates for simpler Bengals uniforms

Football fans care about fashion more than they probably care to admit. Why else do we so obviously care how our favorite team’s uniforms look? Even the re-designing of other franchise’s jerseys get our attention.

The NFL saw five clubs redo their entire uniforms and another just make their color rush alternates their primary kits. The Cincinnati Bengals were not one of these teams, but in the near future, they very well could be next in line for some updated threads.

If former quarterback Boomer Esiason had his way, they’ll be more straightforward from a design perspective.

During a segment of his radio show Boomer and Gio, the Cincinnati icon revealed he is not a fan of the uniforms his former team has sported for the past 15 years and counting. On the topic of a re-design, Esiason hopes for the team to “tone it down”.

During Esaison’s playing days, the team rocked an orange bar completely filled with black stripes on the shoulders of the jerseys and the sides of the pants. If anything, the three-striped sleeve design the team has now is more simplified from what they had, but his distaste for the patterns and colors is evident.

“It’s hard to tone down tiger stripes, but you can,” Esiason said. “I just think the jerseys over the last 15 years have not been all that great-looking.”

It’s more than the stripes, though. The incorporation of orange stripes on black backgrounds and the white bar on the sides of the jerseys is objectively tacky and universally disliked. These aspects must be removed whenever the Bengals do decide to redo their uniforms.

If they take Boomer’s advice, perhaps they’ll get a positive response, which is rare nowadays for new uniform concepts-turned-reality. The safe play would be to just bring back the designs that Esiason once rocked, but a new depiction of the team’s namesake seems likely for a new era of the franchise.

And if they’re smart, they won’t touch the helmets.