Two in the Box

Move over Turdburger, you’ve got company. 

The Bills unveiled their “Nickel City” alternate jerseys on Monday, ending months of leaks and rumors about the design of the jersey and beginning a torrent of negative reviews of the, drab, uninspiring uniforms. 

It’s hard to pick a spot to begin with this uniform. The gray jerseys and pants, paired with a royal blue helmet emblazoned with the red charge from the team’s primary logo is a significant deviation from the team’s primary home and away uniforms. It’s an odd pairing when you see it all together. The all-royal helmet sharply contrasts the drab gray jersey and pants and not in a beneficial way. Nothing about the two elements are complementary to each other. The jerseys are effectively a recolored version of the team’s current home and away uniforms, which are rooted in a very traditional design. Meanwhile, the helmet is a new, dare I say futuristic spin on the team’s primary logo. That makes for a stark contrast between a modern helmet and a traditional jersey. I compared it to pairing an Oregon helmet with Penn State’s uniforms. 

The jerseys are exceptionally boring. They’re a drab, uninspiring design that look more like a discount retail line as opposed to an on-field uniform for a multi-billion dollar enterprise. Choosing color-on-color for the stripes was a bizarre decision. I’ve yet to see a tone-on-tone application make sense on a uniform. The best applications only ever add some additional, understated details to a uniform if you’re close enough to really see them. Those also tend to only show up on the most expensive retail options, meaning few people actually know or understand how they’re meant to function. Most tone-on-tone choices look just like the stripes on the new Bills jerseys, invisible. Gray was going to make for a challenging choice regardless of the rest of the design, but by using the current uniform as the template and then effectively erasing the only feature that adds any additional contrast, they made a uniform that would function better as a practice jersey. 

It’s unfortunate that the entire design isn’t more appealing, because I think the helmets are cool on their own. They aren’t without their faults, but as an alternate helmet, they work on a number of levels. They just don’t make any sense with the jersey they’ve been paired with. That last point will ultimately doom them to the scrap heap of bad uniforms, which is too bad because I think these would be worth keeping around if they could come up with a more interesting jersey to pair them with. 

I understand this helmet isn’t for everybody. But an alternate helmet should bring something different than the team’s standard design. The Bills are lucky to have two excellent throwback options at their disposal with the standing buffalo and 90s era red helmets. I’m glad they tried something new as opposed to recoloring the shell or logo like so many other teams have (also how the Bills own Rivalries helmet was executed). 

I love using the red charge and the bison’s horn as the graphic for the helmet. It’s a dynamic logo that evokes motion and it pops against the blue shell. I also think connecting the stripes at the back was a good choice. I just wish that they hadn’t made the charge so short. I don’t fully understand the decision to start the logo so close to the middle of the shell. It leaves acres of blank space on the front of the helmet and it has the effect of making the helmet look blank if viewed from the front. That’s a bad look for a uniform that is excessively drab to begin with. Had the logo been positioned so it started closer to the front of the helmet, thus making it longer, it would have looked much more natural compared to the final product which feels a little too squat and compact. Starting the logo closer to the front of the shell would have also eliminated all the dead space on the front, creating a better presentation from all angles. 

Another welcome update would be to add a contrasting facemask. Currently, the blue facemask just add to the dead blue space on the front of the helmet. Breaking that up would help the helmet pop as opposed to feeling a little muted. 

Overall, I think the helmet is solid. I’ve tempered my initial reaction a bit from saying it’s a 9/10 to a 7.5/10 due to the shortcomings I mentioned above. It’s a cool concept and had the uniform had been done right, would have added a really interesting look to Buffalo’s collection of uniforms. My hope is that these jerseys get put on a shelf and forgotten but the helmets get some small revisions and stick around with a different alternate uniform that works better with the design of the helmet. 

One other thing that hasn’t sat well with me is the ridiculous graphic guide that was released on Monday morning. These things aren’t new and they’ve been mocked so much that you’d be forgiven if you thought the graphic the Bills put out was a parody. It features passages about the “nickel gray foundation” and how the blue collar is “a tribute to blue-collar workers of past and present.” Smarter people than me have noted the irony of these statements when the team is about to open a $2.2 billion stadium that is pricing out the very blue collar workers the jersey is meant to celebrate. 

Every entry on the graphic is laughable, but the tonal stripes has to be the most ridiculous. 

“With the exact stripes weights & ratios as our primary uniform, these tonal stripes are formed under extreme pressure as a sign of strength and durability.”

What are we doing here? Just say you made them gray because you wanted this to be different from the home, away and color rush jerseys. I also can’t overlook the irony of the inspiration of the gray base color being pulled from “the steel mills, grain elevators and rail yards.” What better way to celebrate our collective blue collar history than to draw inspiration from all the stuff that’s been closed down for decades?

The Nickel City nickname is not new. Why do we need to create these convoluted and, frankly, insulting reasons for picking the color when they could have just very simply said they jerseys are gray because nickels are gray? Well, silver, but same difference. That’s a direct, a-to-b connection. Don’t insult our intelligence with platitudes about authenticity when a simple, more obvious option exists. As an aside, if they wanted to play up the Nickel City angle, why not make a helmet with a bison that has the same texturing as, you know, the buffalo nickel? 

That idea, however, is best left with someone far more talented with Photoshop than I. The bottom line here is that this is not a good uniform. The helmet and jersey are a complete mismatch and the jersey itself is bland and uninteresting. I’m sure we’ll see plenty of them in the stands and tailgate lots throughout the year, but for their first real alternate (read: not Color Rush or Rivalries), this one is a miss. Hopefully we’re not subjected to it more than once a year.