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Monday Morning Uni Watch

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Good morning, and happy 2023! Hope everyone is enjoying a great New Year’s weekend.

Now then: The Lions wore their no-frills throwbacks yesterday (lots of additional photos here). But what really interests me about that photo shown above is that defensive lineman John Cominsky had “EMC” inscribed on his cast. Assuming Cominsky isn’t an Einstein fan, what was that about? Turns out that the letters are the initials of his baby daughter, Emersyn Mae Caminsky.

Although I wasn’t aware of it until now, this isn’t a new thing for Caminsky. During several other recent games, he’s had “BNC” on the cast, which I believe is for his wife, Brittany Cominsky. And he’s mentioned on Instagram that he wears his family’s initials on his wrist.

In other news from around the league yesterday:

  • The Panthers wore their blue alternate jerseys and paired them with silver pants. It’s the first time they’ve worn that jersey/pants combo since 2017 (the blue jerseys have instead been paired with white pants or black pants in the intervening years), and the first time they’ve ever added blue socks to that combo in a regular season game (instead of black socks, as they’ve worn in the past).
  • From that same game: I’ve recently written about how Panthers players Frankie Luvu and Henry Anderson have both modified the shoulder stripes on their white and black jerseys. But yesterday was Carolina’s first time this season wearing the blue jerseys, so did Luvu and Anderson modify their stripes again? Yup:
  • The Ravens wore their mono-black alternates:
  • Just a brutal-looking game in Atlanta, where the Falcons went mono-black against the Cardinals:
  • The Seahawks wore their grey alternate pants:
  • Jets linebacker CJ Mosley had “All or Nothing” written on his eye black prior to the game:
  • The Commies for some reason waited until the next-to-last game of the season to introduce a new costumed mascot, named Major Tuddy. His uniform is based on the franchise’s 1980s-’90s design, which seems like a tacit admission that the team’s current uniform isn’t very good. And in what may be the most absurd bit of “storytelling” ever, his double-zero uni number is supposedly meant to mimic a pig’s nostrils (additional info here and here).

  • Only one home team wore white: the Bucs.

As for tonight: Should be a fairly straightforward-looking game between the Bills and Bengals.

(My thanks to all contributors, including Gabe Cornwall, Moe Khan, Scott Trembly, Nicholas Walz, and everyone on Twitter who helped fill me on John Cominsky’s family initials.)

• • • • •
On a personal note: It was 24 years ago yesterday — Jan. 1, 1999 — that I made the first New Year’s resolution of my life: to create a new sports column devoted to uniforms. It was something I’d been thinking about for awhile, but I hadn’t actually done anything to make it happen. The resolution was the nudge I needed to get off my ass and make it real.

By the end of May, I’d done it, and Uni Watch was born. It’s still the only New Year’s resolution I’ve ever made, but it was a good one.

Meanwhile: Sorry, no Ticker today, as the whole Uni Watch crew had the day off yesterday. Thanks for understanding, and enjoy the Winter Classic! — Paul

 
  
 
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Comments (36)

    Happy New Year, Paul. And also to the other contributors and members of this community!
    The Washington mascot is yet again another air ball from this organisation, with a lawsuit from former players about copyrighting the Hog name in its wake. And why is Tuddy a major and not a commodore? I understand that Major Tuddy sounds better than Commie Tuddy, but choosing a pig is already a tricky decision in view of the various cultural or religious backgrounds shared by maybe more Washington fans than the team is aware of. A family friendly mascot to go with the Commodores name? A Wood Thrush or a Dinosaur (both are official DC symbols) with the name Lionel (as in Richie, of the Commodores).

    The mascot’s name should have been Stormin’ Norman Porkchopf.

    While the real person Norman Schwarzkopf was a general, he served as commander of the US central command, so that solves that. The effort put into this mascot costume is pretty low rank, by the way. Whoever executed this should be thrown in the brig. Or put on latrine duty, at least.

    “And why is Tuddy a major and not a commodore?”

    Because the team is named Commanders, not Commodores.

    Like everything the WFT touches, it turns to shite. But *technically* (according to the always correct Wikipedia):

    “Commander is also a generic term for an officer commanding any armed forces unit, for example “platoon commander”, “brigade commander” and “squadron commander”. In the police, terms such as “borough commander” and “incident commander” are used.”
    link

    But yeah, it’s more appropriate for the Navy, since it’s an actual rank in that organization.
    link

    Snyder has ruined that organization, and while I have only circumstantial evidence, it appears he’s trying to burn everything down before he’s inevitably forced to leave. Kinda like a certain “Commander” in Chief and the new owner of the Twitter.

    Part of me thinks that Dan Snyder is going with boring, bad and generic brand identity as preemptive revenge for being forced to sell the “Washington” franchise.

    Maj Tuddy does have a better uniform than the Commies though.

    Great look for the Panthers. Would like to see that more often. Not so much the modified jerseys though.

    Really liked that uniform combo for the Panthers. Want to see more of that.

    Of course how it goes, Always at least one dog of a game each NFL weekend. No thank you Falcons ands Cards. I have hope this may be one of the last times we see the Cardinals in this uniform.. If Cardinals don’t have a new uniform next year I have to ask the question. Are the team officials completely out of touch with want needs to be done? Oblivious? Feels like they are being stubborn and in denial at this point about how bad it looks.

    Missed opportunity for the Bears to wear their 1936 throwbacks and create a historical aesthetic.

    was thinking the same thing…..would have been a better looking game. the lions may want to bust these out again since they played so well in them….it was either that or the bears were just that bad yesterday.

    Well watching games there are tons of players who had swooshes in different spots and patches because of what would seam to be minor tailoring things.

    Happy New Year, Uni Watch!

    Lions, Seahawks and Panthers look so much better in gray pants…it would be a nice if all 3 went with those full time.

    Major Tuddy is essentially a pig version of Steely McBeam better dressed.

    My opinion too! Emphasizing the blue is nice in that way.

    And the two players with modified shoulder stripes show off how nice it might be to not have black stripes up there. I’m not sure about having the modified stripes, I just mean that the black stripes don’t seem like a nice look on the blue shirts. Maybe choose no stripes since the socks have no stripes?

    The Lions throwbacks are the best in the NFL. Takes me back to when I was a kid in the 1950’s and the great Lions teams of Bobby Layne, Leon Hart, Joe Schmidt wore these unis at Briggs (later Tiger) Stadium. Pure classic. The Lions should keep these permanently.

    I like the Lions throwbacks. BUT…
    Better throwbacks: Patriots, Bucs, Saints, Falcons, Dolphins… to name 5. The Lions’ throwbacks cut out a lot of the modern changes that worsened their look, but they’re almost too plain. Silver helmets without stripes or a logo, no shoulder stripes, no pants stripes, no sock stripes. The Sanders Era was their best look IMO.

    Definitely. What Paul Lukas said.

    Though, I wouldn’t object to Silver numerals with White trim, which they wore immediately prior to the Barry Sanders’s uniforms

    MLB.com has an article up about the weirdest uniforms in baseball history (not just MLB). I’m sure pretty much all of this has been discussed here before, and in fact both Paul and Phil’s Twitter feeds appear in the piece (along with Todd Radom’s). link

    Lions do look good in this combination. Add the lion to the helmet and it makes for a very nice regular home uniform. No need for stripes on jersey, helmet, pants or socks. Perfect minimalism. Although the classic Northwestern stripes on helmet, sleeves and pants would also look good but not as good as this 1936 version.

    I think the Panthers should replace everything that is grey (helmet, shoulder striping, pants) and make it white. There are already too many accent colours going on.

    Congratulations, Paul Lukas!
    Thank you for keeping that New Years Resolution!

    Huge fan since the Village Voice days, which OBTW has a resurrected website and great archives. Whenever the biorhythm gets low, I can look to the VV Archives for Uniwatch or Michael Musto Blind Item columns and get an immediate uplift!

    Thank you so much for making our days, weeks and years brighter!

    Fun fact, An Army/Marine Corps/Air Force/Space Force Major correlates not to a Commander but a Lt. Commander. The Navy/Coast Guard rank of Commander correlates to Lt. Col. for all other branches of the military. Of course Dan Snyder fucked this up and gave his own mascot the wrong fucking rank.

    No one mentioned the Cowboys disaster last week. Simply hideous. The Cowboys have a very nice team color scheme, an appealing logo and just burn it down. This week’s costume was a tribute to what exactly? Looking for alternative usage for the white helmet revived for throwback Thanksgiving? Going to use navy blue now instead of royal blue appearing on your usual white jerseys? Going to ignore your silver (metallic blue) on the uniform except leaving one silver stripe on your pants? When do you decide to wear metallic green sometimes? I don’t know why this franchise can be appraised as the most valuable in professional sports and decides to dress their players in afterthought clothing.

    I think the blue jersey over silver with blue sox that the Carolina Panthers wore on Sunday looked great! I don’t think they have ever worn that combination before either. Normally anytime Carolina wore their blue Jersey over silver pants they would always wear black sox, I think pairing the blue Jersey/silver pants combo looks a lot better with blue sox!

    That Arizona/Atlanta matchup had two, full length, side stripe unis matching up (or not matching up as in the photo above) in a game. How often does this occur?

    Looks like the Ravens have worn alternates 4 times (3 black, 1 color rush) the last couple of seasons. Seems other teams are capped at 3.

    That Cardinals/Falcons picture is like a pic of all the terrible uniform fads since the early 2000s.

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