During the early stages of the 2016 National Football League season, the league unveiled all of the Color Rush uniforms that would be worn for that season’s Thursday Night Football action. That included an all-navy blue look for the New England Patriots, which was their first actual alternate uniform since the team experimented with wearing silver alternate jerseys during the mid-Aughts.
The look proved to be a popular one for the Patriots — so much so that ahead of the 2020 season, New England announced that the team would be promoting the former Color Rush uniforms to the position of being their new primary home uniform going forward. When it comes to the history of New England’s football uniforms, this will be the first time in franchise history that the team will be wearing a monochrome uniform as their primary home look.
The Patriots went ahead and made the former Color Rush uniform design the focal point of the team’s new look as well. In addition to promoting their alternates to primary, New England unveiled a brand new away uniform to compliment their “new” home uniform. The shoulder stripe design from the home uniform have been ported over to the away uniform and it appears that the team will continue to wear navy pants on the road as well, since the pants are the same as the pants that the team wears with the navy jerseys as well.
As is becoming something of a custom for every team that has unveiled a new look during this offseason, the Patriots also indicated that they would be in favor of a change to the one-helmet rule. Similar to the other teams, their reasoning for the rule change is the fact that they would “hope to incorporate [the throwback uniform] into our uniform rotation in the future.” The team has returned to the shoulder stripes that the team wore for much of their history and the team used to wear the “Pat Patriot”-era uniforms as a throwback option before the league mandated that teams would be restricted to just one helmet shell a season. So it’s safe to say that if (or when) the rule is changed, the Patriots will be resurrecting their popular throwback uniforms as well.
While the jerseys themselves are perfectly fine, the color combinations that the Patriots have put on display here are a little questionable. With the home uniform, it’s hard to take too much issue with what they now have as a primary uniform — aside from the thick white stripe with a thin red outline on the pants not matching the equal-sized stripes on the jersey. Still, I personally think that a pair of silver pants would have been the better choice when it comes to balancing out the colors in the uniform. The same could be said for the away look as well. With that being said, those are still personal quibbles and I generally can’t fault the Patriots for sticking with a look that was already popular with their fanbase and not messing with it too much from there.
In the grand scheme of things, this is a decent step when it comes to New England updating their look. While the Patriots may have risen to the top of the NFL for an extended period of time while wearing their now-previous set of uniforms, those same uniforms were also becoming a bit dated and a carefully-planned change would have been welcome. While this new uniform shift for the Patriots may not be the most exciting thing in the football world, it’s an okay way for them to update without fully leaving behind a look that represents their rise to glory.
