By Michael Stets
DETROIT–The Lions will still look like the Lions at the start of the upcoming 2017 NFL season, but with Thursday night’s unveiling of four new uniforms, the team has added a few new wrinkles to its appearance.
At the Season Ticket Member Summit at Ford Field, the team rolled out new home, away and Color Rush uniforms, as well as a new version of the throwback, which hasn’t been worn since the Thanksgiving game in 2010. The base colors will remain the same, with the biggest visible change to the color scheme being the removal of black from the uniform and helmet entirely.
“I think the first thing was we wanted to get the black out of the uniforms and go back to the traditional Honolulu blue and silver,” said team president Rod Wood. “That kind of led us to coming up with the creative ideas on what we could do to keep the Honolulu blue and silver, but also modernize the look.”
A new color called anthracite, or dark steel grey, has been brought into the mix and will serve as trim for both the silver numbers on the home jerseys and the Honolulu blue numbers of the away jerseys. The away uniforms will also feature Honolulu blue pants, while the home uniform pants will remain silver. The team also has the option to rotate pants colors, Wood said.
Dark steel grey serves as the main color of the Color Rush uniform’s pants and jersey, which has white numbers trimmed with Honolulu blue. The home, away and Color Rush uniforms will all have a screen printed “LIONS” on the right sleeve, and on the left sleeve a “WCF” to honor the late William Clay Ford Sr. The throwback jersey is Honolulu blue with silver block numbers and no striping. And the helmet, which previously had a black face mask, now has a silver one. “I think we are the only team in the NFL that has silver face masks,” said Wood.
The team will start deciding what uniforms to wear for each of the games once the schedule is released next Thursday, Wood said. And If the Lions do not have a Thursday night game, which is the game all teams feature Color Rush uniforms, Wood says they would “have to evaluate whether or not to use it,” for another game. In the past the Lions have worn their throwback uniforms on Thanksgiving, but Wood said they could also wear them for a “big primetime game.”
Nike designer Steve McClard, who was the lead on the creation of the Lions new Nike Vapor Untouchable jerseys, grew up in Shelby Township and is a longtime fan of the team. Growing up in the 80s, he says he was “enamored” with former Lions running back Billy Simms. Once McClard learned about the project, the Western Michigan graduate, who began working for Nike in 1998, felt compelled to be in control of it.
“The reaction to my team was, ‘no one is touching this but me,’” said McClard, who was also behind the recent launch of the new University of Michigan football uniforms. “What a dream to work on your hometown team years later after moving cross country.”
With the Lions having a storied tradition and Wood being clear on the vision the team was seeking, McClard says those two factors “sped up the process for us, which can normally take much longer.”
So, how many designs were there before narrowing the number down to four?
“We always start broad,” explained McClard, who said working on the new Lions jerseys was the “sweetest” project of his career. “And I would say just through the editing process we literally probably went through 40 different iterations with three sort of several different concepts before we landed on the final versions.”
Before coming to the decision on the final four uniform designs, Wood said, “it took maybe six or seven meetings, looking at three or four options per meeting.” He called it a “great process,” and said, “Nike came up with a great result.”
Eric Ebron, who was joined by his teammates Ameer Abdullah and Ziggy Ansah for the festivities on Thursday night, is happy that the team has some different options to look forward to for the upcoming season.
“I’m in love because not only do we get to wear something new but we all get to walk into the locker room every Sunday and not expect the same traditional blue or white,” Ebron said. “We can mix and match now. We have alternate colors, we finally brought back the throwback jerseys, we have a Color Rush jersey. We’re excited.”
And so were the Lions fans, who were lining up to buy the new jerseys, which went on sale immediately after being revealed to the 3,700 season ticket holders who were in attendance.
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— Detroit Lions (@Lions) April 14, 2017
