NFL not letting Rams use preferred throwback uniforms more often, because it's the NFL

Frank Schwab
·NFL writer

The NFL isn’t exactly progressive in many areas. It took decades for the league to realize that touchdown celebrations aren’t the end of civilization.

The NFL’s inflexibility might be at its worst when it comes to uniforms. An NFL team changing its uniforms is a multi-year task, and in the case of the Los Angeles Rams, not much leeway is given.

Here’s the Rams’ issue: They aren’t fond of their current uniform scheme, including the navy uniforms that everyone seems to hate, and they want to more often wear the blue-and-yellow Eric Dickerson-era kits from the 1980s and 1990s. They won a Super Bowl wearing those uniforms. They’re more meaningful to the fans in Los Angeles, because the Rams wore that getup before they left for St. Louis after the 1994 season. There’s a connection to those uniforms that there clearly isn’t for the St. Louis-era garb.

But, nope. According to the Los Angeles Times, the NFL hasn’t yet allowed the Rams to use the throwbacks as their primary uniform because … well, who knows. The Times reported that the Rams are talking to the league about wearing the blue-and-yellow uniforms more often. The fans want them, but the league limits those uniforms to two “throwback” games.

Los Angeles Rams receiver Pharaoh Cooper in the blue-and-yellow uniform the team wants to wear more often in 2018. (AP)
Los Angeles Rams receiver Pharaoh Cooper in the blue-and-yellow uniform the team wants to wear more often in 2018. (AP)

Rams echoed fans’ feelings to league

The Times wrote that the Rams requested to the NFL last season that they be allowed to wear the throwback look in Week 6 against Jacksonville and in a wild-card playoff game against Atlanta, and the team was denied both requests.

“We have spent the year educating [the NFL] on our fan base,” Rams chief operating officer and vice president for football operations Kevin Demoff told the Los Angeles Times. “We forwarded them all of the fan complaints, the emails we get, so I think they’re well aware of our fans’ preferences.”

There aren’t many situations on the schedule in which the team would have to wear the navy jerseys it apparently hates. Demoff looked at the schedule and found no situation in which the team would have to wear dark jerseys on the road (“If we can avoid wearing our Navy jerseys next year, we will,” he told the Los Angeles Times).

Rams’ rebranding efforts continue

The Rams are in the process of a uniform overhaul, but that won’t happen until 2019 or 2020 the Times reported. The team originally wanted to unveil new uniforms with the anticipated 2019 opening of its new stadium in Inglewood, but the opening of the new home was delayed a year, which also might change the release of the uniform rebrand.

In the meantime, the Rams will keep trying to get the league to let it wear the blue and yellow more often, which everyone seems to want.

“It was always with the idea that we’d be able to revisit it during the offseason when there’s more time to plan,” Demoff told the Times. “Hopefully, they recognize the challenge we have and appreciate the connection the fan base has to the blue and yellow.”

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Frank Schwab is a writer for Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at shutdown.corner@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!