The Buffalo Bills Should Bring Back The Throwback

The Buffalo Bills are a franchise with a rich, storied tradition. As one of the charter members of the American Football League, organized in 1959, they are  celebrating a half-century this year.

The first thing they should do to commemorate the occasion is return to their old look. (In their inaugural season they had silver helmets with no logo. That was look not memorable and wasn't kept.) Beginning with their second season, they used the classic red grazing Buffalo on a white helmet with a center stripe, royal blue (home) jersey and white pants.

This uniform style has been revived on a limited basis by the team as a "throwback." We strongly recommend that the new uniforms be thrown out and the throwback become the standard, forever more.

If it makes sense for marketing purposes, the team can wear one or two of the other variations at home games, on a given day, as "throwbacks," but the original throwback should be the bring-back.

The old grazing buffalo is pure (as opposed to the flashy, charging one with speed-lines).  That retro look fits Buffalo, in the way Buffalo is eternally retro, always was retro before retro was retro, sort of iconic in a way that's both quaint and a little musty.

Of course the speeding Buffalo represents the K-gun. Translate: hopes dashed, frustration, and serial frustration. Translate: "four-feat" (four-peat with defeat).

Back when the classic look was the only look, BIlls fans had dreams of making the Superbowl without the accompanying nightmares, without the creeping, nagging suspicion that the Bills may have morphed into the Cubs of the NFL. They had their innocence, their Superbowl viriginity.

In order to both make it to another Superbowl, and actually win one, it will be necessary to purge the team of the logo and the look that suffered four consecutive anti-climaxes and go back to the look that won Buffalo it's only league championships.

More importantly, however, is the fact that an analysis of the correlation between maintaining a classic franchise identity and Superbowl appearances, shows that teams who have maintained or reverted to their original modern era look have both played in and won Superbowls at a dramatically higher rate than teams with frequent changes in colors, uniform styles and/or logo.

(See my article http://bleacherreport.com/articles/215108-assessing-the-importance-of-tradition-in-nfl-team-branding) 

It makes sense that newer franchises may benefit from changing their look with each new trend in iconography, however the teams with the tradition, Buffalo specifically (since most of the others already do), should reflect that tradition in their uniforms, helmets and in every aspect of their branding.