Green Bay Packers Throwbacks: Grading the Pack's New Threads

 The Green Bay Packers are going old school this week against the Rams, and it’s a school most of us never attended.

We’ve grown up watching NFL uniforms get brighter and shinier and day-glo and all that. And now here come the Packers, who for the second consecutive season will be putting on threads that are replicas of the jerseys worn by the team in 1929.

This throwback date is significant in that it was in 1929 that Curly Lambeau, for whom the Packers’ home turf is named, coached his team to the first of its record 13 championships in what was then a small enterprise, the fledgling National Football League, which wouldn’t be recognizable to the current fan until the mid-1930s.

Lambeau’s day job was working for the Acme Packing Co., and Acme management sprung for $500 to clothe the team in return for some free publicity, which included having the team named Packers, among the oldest sporting monikers still in continuous use on the planet.

The Packers went 12-0-1 that year, setting a standard that was met by the current team, which will wear the uniforms against the Rams after having won the Super Bowl last February.

The jersey isn’t one of those things that comes at you with an instant influx of nostalgia, not with blue jerseys dominated on the front by a gold circle in which the player’s number is shown in block type.

The brown helmets and tan pants take some getting used to, too.

That being against there is something to be said about getting a look at the way things used to look. I’m not sure that having these uniforms in use on a weekly basis would go over all that well, but that’s not really their purpose.

They do figure to appeal to some, and that will generate sales of the replicas of the replicas to the public, and if there is anything that warms the heart of the NFL, it’s another revenue stream.

The Packers wore similar uniforms in Week 13 last year against San Francisco, and it didn’t turn out half-bad for the home squad, who pounded the 49ers 34-16.