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XFL Unveils Latest Shitty Uniforms, Misspells League Owner’s Name

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The eight XFL 3.0 teams unveiled their new uniforms yesterday. Unlike XFL 2.0’s uniforms, which didn’t have maker’s marks, the new uniforms carry Under Armour branding on the jerseys, pants, and socks.

Here’s a quick video overview of the eight home uniforms (the most notable moment comes at the 0:13 mark):

You can tell this version of the XFL is waaaaaay more professional than XFL 1.0 and 2.0 because they misspelled league owner Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s name in the unveiling press release. Really! Can’t make it up:

(They fixed the typo after I tweeted about it yesterday. And yes, they also misspelled “gridiron,” which they didn’t fix.)

Each team posted a video showing additional uni details. For some reason, all of the videos are vertically oriented and have terrible lighting. So yeah, XFL 3.0 is off to a great start. Here we go:

Arlington Renegades

D.C. Defenders

Houston Roughnecks

Orlando Guardians

St. Louis Battlehawks

San Antonio Brahmas

Seattle Sea Dragons

Vegas Vipers

———

Obviously, most of these are pretty bad, but I’m not the target audience, so whatever. If you want to learn more and have a good laugh along the way, ESPN, which is broadcasting the league’s games, ran this hilariously obsequious puff-piece segment on the new designs:

This is the part where I say something like “Take a good look at these while you can, because they won’t be around very long,” and then some of you insist that this time will be different and the league will actually be a big success, and then I say it’s nice how some people continue to believe in the Tooth Fairy. So there, we got all of that out of the way.

XFL 3.0’s schedule is set to begin on Feb. 18, which is the Saturday after the Super Bowl.

 
  
 

Broncos-Redesign Contest Results Now Available

I recently put out the call for new Broncos designs, and I’m happy to report that you folks did not disappoint. The best and most interesting submissions I received are now available over on Substack.

You can read the first part of the article here. In order to read the entire thing, you’ll need to be become a paid subscriber, which I hope you’ll consider doing. Thanks!

 

Bowled Over

If you’ve ever spent any time at retro shops or flea markets (or if your mom had a certain kind of design sense), you’ve probably seen those ubiquitous colored Pyrex nesting bowls. I’ve admired them for decades but could never justify buying them because, well, I already had enough bowls.

But the other day someone in my neighborhood Buy Nothing group offered the two bowls shown above for free, so I snapped them up. So nice!

At some point maybe I’ll get the blue and red bowls to the complete the set, but for now I’m very happy just to have these two. Uni Watch colors!

• • • • •
I have a doctor’s appointment this morning (nothing serious). Play nice while I’m away. — Paul

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XFL
Comments (69)

    Flip the Dallas and Houston colors. On the whole not great unis-but at least they’re not all red (looking at you USFL 2.0).

    An interesting issue brought up has been regarding the relocations of franchises in both XFL 3.0 and the USFL Season 2, possibly due to cities carrying teams in both and/or fan support in each of those cities. These particular uniforms are particularly bad, which doesn’t bode well for this season. For the most part I’ve put my support behind the USFL.

    The lighting is atrocious in the individual videos. That is just unforgivable and not sure how they didn’t even try to fix in post. But generally I like these unis and hope the league does well. I don’t know what form it will take and/or which league might be the one to succeed, but there is a market for secondary off-season football I still think. And don’t care about the typos.

    My guess is that they consider the lighting and the vertical orientation to be features, not bugs. They probably wanted to look “cool”. That being said, I agree with you, they are terrible videos for showing and promoting their jerseys, which presumably they want to sell a lot of.

    Yeah its funny how film/video/whatever visual medium goes thru the trends of ‘more of this must be better’ which gives us bleached out colors in the 90s, reality handheld everything in the 00s, and now ‘leak’-style Tiktok vids. hopefully this too shall pass.

    Anyone else still wishing upon a star they’ll do actual cool uniforms for one of these semi-pro/betting leagues? honestly such a waste…

    Pretty obvious the vertical orientation is because these are twitter clips and they want the full view in the orientation in the same way most people hold their phones.

    The lighting was a lame attempt at being cool.

    They don’t want anyone to see how shitty the uniforms really are. Not that many people will ever see them in action anyway. Probably one season and done again.

    ??
    If you’re talking home uniforms, Houston and Seattle had the only non-mono uniforms, 5 teams have non-mono away, St. Louis not being one of them.

    So those of us at work can never see the pix bc of our no twitter policy… so i can never see most of the content

    The Brahamas cracks me up. In my teenage years I loved watching The Rock in WWF, and over the years have enjoyed him as an action star in movies you just don’t take too seriously. But man, this guy has leaned completely into the self promotion thing lately, using one of your own nicknames for a pro sports team name, that is, well, something.

    When it comes to pro wrestlers who name a sports team they own after their own nickname, The Rock is not the best there is, the best there was, nor the best there ever will be.

    For those who don’t get the reference: the Calgary Hitmen.

    Then you’ve got the major junior hockey Hamilton Fincups. Renaming the team that had been known as Red Wings for years using a combination of the surnames of the new team owners. Making common fans ask “WTF is a Fincup?”.

    link

    You would think for someone who spent as long as he did in pro wrestling, The Rock would understand the importance of visual presentation. And yet.

    I will acknowledge that, having gone to an XFL game in DC pre-pandemic, it was accessible and fun despite the level of on field play (think MAC football). Certainly a better value, and arguably a better visual experience, than the local NFL team offers at the moment.

    Misspelling the name of one of the league’s owners is … a problem. The only “Dwyane” I was aware of is Dwyane Wade.

    These uniforms are fine. They kept the reigns fairly tight.

    However: I think any of these wannabe football leagues would do well to stick with cities that don’t have NFL teams. Not only do I predict Arlington and Seattle will struggle to find footing in metro areas that are diehard about their NFL teams, the fact that they want (or need) to differentiate themselves from the local NFL franchises almost hurts them. Don’t expect seattlites to start buying red and Kelly green gear for some short season “who’s that” league during mariners season when their 3 major clubs all have the city wearing navy and teal and neon green. And definitely don’t expect Arlington folks to switch to oilers colors in cowboys territory. The best any of these leagues can expect is a buyout by the NFL wherein they become a minor league of sorts or an annexation/expansion short cut. Hence stick with locales like St. Louis, that won’t mind having a team back if expansion is the goal, or stick with “nearby” cities like San Antonio that will make sense as a minor league venue for the closest NFL squad. Mixing a few of those in with other major markets that already have teams isn’t going to help anybody’s cause. Problem is: the NFL and the perception and medical realities of American football at the moment won’t sustain a minor league. It’s just more chance to get hurt. And it’s not likely that the NFL will agree to expand by 8 teams all at once.

    But they should have tried their best to stick to spots that didn’t have teams, like St Louis, San Antonio, Portland, Salt Lake City, Charlotte.

    I don’t know yet if it will be the same 3 years later, but Seattle did support the Dragons pretty well in 2020.

    Ha! Oh yeah! I stand corrected. I was really wracking my brain to think of major markets that the NFL isn’t in. My mistake.

    I understand the verticle videos appeal to TikTok and YouTube Shorts audiences, but a simple check through Grammarly could have caught a few of those mistakes. However, misspelling the owner’s name is embarrassing. I do with the XFL well, and I might even make the trip to St. Louis for a game.

    I have never understood the concept of appealing to phone based audiences with the vertically oriented videos. It takes less than a second to rotate how you hold your phone into the horizontal video position. Sort of like when people are sharing videos from their seat at a live event, they are cropping out the action by holding it vertically.
    There are specific things that work better in a portrait/vertically oriented style, but most content you are viewing work better in the landscape format, hence why tvs are oriented that way.
    Ease of consumption (especially when it just requires changing the positioning of a hand held device) should not be the priority over better formatting.

    I think I speak for most fans: I love football, but by the time February-April rolls around, I’m much more into the NBA, hockey, conference tourneys and March Madness, and the start of baseball. Why watch minor league football when there’s plenty of other sports to watch? (Or, you can spend your weekends actually doing stuff, like seeing friends or going outdoors.)

    Every other league has minor leagues playing concurrently. With NIL in effect, that ship has sailed, as no 18 year old will forgo a rabid fan base with the potential for millions of dollars to sign with a minor league team paying thousands for a 8 game schedule in a converted baseball stadium.

    What Marc said. Plus it’s so much harder to play football into middle age unless you’re a kicker (Tom Brady is an alien cyborg), and it’s not the kind of sport where you want to play full-on (even at a semi-pro level) to rehabilitate an injury. And with the level of short and long term punishment your body goes through playing the sport we are already seeing players who play one or two contracts and get out of the on-field game. I’m not sure there are too many people who would risk their health and livelihood for a semi-pro paycheck while better players pass them up for a pro contract. With all that in consideration I just don’t think there’s a legit talent base and decent risk/reward ratio to make a minor league happen. NCAA is essentially the minor leagues, and it’s already so huge that the only ones missing out on that are the NFL for not getting a slice of that payday.

    The NFL awaits a secondary league that actually makes some enviable financial noise in enough untapped markets that a buyout would be worth the investment.

    I contributed to the Broncos contest. Not being able to see if the concept is there or not and what (if anything) you thought of it really sucks.

    This does suck. I wonder how many people who provided content for the article were not Substack subscribers, and if Paul might consider making an exception and opening this one up to everyone since it was mostly provided by fans of the site.

    I do not like the team names and I do not like the uniforms at all. Under Armour is simply not capable of designing a nice looking uniform at any level of competition in any sport. It always looks like a rough, angular sketch that has, by accident, become an actual 3D item. As for off season football, as a former employee of NFL Europe I always hope for succes for any league, be it USFL, XFL or whatever FL, but I know better: not enough fans are really interested in the long run. They want fall and winter football.

    “Under Armour is simply not capable of designing a nice looking uniform at any level of competition in any sport.”
    That wasn’t always the case…they came up with a terrific (though small) line of college baseball uniforms over a decade ago:
    link
    I’ll begrudgingly be tuning into NASCAR Cup come February…rather watch rolling ads with weird number placements than this iteration of the XFL.

    The only thing I’m watching is the attendance numbers of the non NFL cities. I hope the NFL looks at that when they consider expansion. My apologies to the other cities, but I really want St. Louis to win that battle.

    I really hope the NFL doesn’t expand. They’re already overextended talent-wise. None of the teams are really all that good.

    My wife and I went to an XFL game here in Arlington before COVID shut them down. It was pretty full of people and the tickets and concessions were cheap. Hopefully they keep the same strategy because we had a lot of fun and wanted to go to more games.

    While most of the uniform designs are mediocre at best, the Roughnecks going with a Texas flag layout for the helmet is pretty ingenious and I don’t hate it for a minor league team. I’m surprised that we haven’t seen another Texas team do this; has this been done before?

    I always thought the half-n-half helmet was a clever concept, particularly for the Texans because of the flag and their logo is literally a head that is half and half color blocked. However, logistically I don’t know if I’d love it as a quarterback. Looking over top of the line for open receivers and depending on what direction your guys are facing they are wearing different colors. Makes a quick read much harder. Particularly if your helmets are – let’s say – white and blue and you’re playing a team with all blue helmets. When you have a couple of big ol’ rushers coming at you and you’re scanning the field and it looks like you have half as many guys out there as you should. But I’ve never been a quarterback, so I could be wrong.

    Interesting how the Vipers and Guardians appear to have traded colour schemes compared to XFL v 2.0.

    Seattle uni is my fave. Orange over white and not mono-colour at home. An upgrade over the Seattle v 2.0 unis. Was expecting them to be primary navy.

    Houston is the worst. The helmet alone gives it this ranking plus other issues with the uniform.

    What’s the story behind the bull’s head logo on the back of each jersey (above the nameplate)? That was odd.

    Most of these designs are just forgettable, which is a bigger sin than being bad.

    Best Of The Best:
    San Antonio (gray and gold is a different color scheme)
    Seattle (I dig the colors and helmets)
    Orlando (great colors, but the sleeve caps take away a bit)
    DC (changing their red helmet white is a massive downgrade on a great uniform)

    Worst:
    LV Vipers (just lame)
    Arlington (inconsistent number font)
    St Louis (too mono)
    Houston (what’s with that helmet, bro?)

    As Paul said, these won’t be around long enough to be missed.

    I’m commenting here for one reason and one reason only: PAUL, MAKING YOUR READERS READ SWEAR WORDS IN HEADLINES IS NOT COOL!!! Not gonna keep getting my uni news from you if this is what you are gonna do. Please stop it.

    So now we have two teams with Guardians as a nickname? Yawners.
    What’s next Commanders X 2?
    Sheesh.

    I’m fine with Guardians in MLB and XFL…and see no problem with having (for examples) 2 Rangers, Cardinals, Giants, Panthers, Kings, and Jets.

    I know, but the Cleveland guardians were just born last year. They are still wet behind the ears.

    I’m sure we had that yellow bowl when I was a kid. I can taste the potato salad we made in it. Thanks for sharing.

    Seattle’s uni looks like it could have been a contestant for the Denver Broncos redo.

    My Mom had the 4 colored bowl set when I was younger, but I think they got broken during one of the various SoCal earthquakes. She bought another set after that, which is beige with a flower print on them.

    Never been into it (although several of my friends are). What I like about this Pyrex set is the contrast between the colored exteriors and the white interiors. Not as fond of the solid-colored Fiestaware, but that’s just me.

    The Vipers still don’t have a stadium agreement. My money says they never play a game in Las Vegas. Hello San Jose or San Francisco.

    Renegades logo looks like a D and R, aren’t they supposed to be Arlington not Dallas?

    What designer looked at the previous incarnation of the Sea Dragons helmets (which was awesome) and thought he/she could improve on it by simply placing that shitty scribbled logo on the side of an orange helmet?

    Regarding those that believe in the Tooth Fairy, it should be pointed out that The Rock starred in a movie adaptation of the Tooth Fairy, as Paul undoubtedly knew and went for the deep cut reference.

    these unis are nothing to write home about…..the inaugural season had better ones. at least they tried to be different. anyone notice on the pic of russell wilson the imprint of the cross and the 3? never seen that before. fumbling the spelling of the owner’s name is comical, to say the least. and spelling of gridiron too. lighting was horrible for the unis too. who’s the marketing guy? lol. selecting cities with already established NFL teams is a risk in itself much less trying to sell their brand of football. some type of minor league football (practice squad players) should be able to work considering how well it works in mlb and nba. i think people will watch players they are familiar with (backups, etc.) from the nfl. (at least, i will).

    Why does it look like my 8 year old daughter is filming all of the video clips? Jesus. Can someone turn a friggin spotlight on so I can see all of the nonsense clearly?

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