Nike will now supply the National Football league with all of its team uniforms and accessories
NIKE’S LATEST MARKETING WIN: A CONTRACT TO DESIGN THE NFL’S OFFICIAL UNIFORMS. HERE’S A TASTE OF WHAT’S TO COME.
Nike’s ascendancy to mega-brand status began with basketball, on the feet of Michael Jordan. But, on April 5, 2012, the company finally unveiled a dramatic new branding strategy: Nike has now replaced Reebok as the official uniform sponsor of the National Football League, and will be charged with designing uniforms for all 32 NFL teams.
Click Images To Enlarge
It’s the crown jewel of a push that Nike has been making into football for years, through college football, and their Bowl-season designs for the University of Oregon have become a mini event. None of the designs rolled out yesterday have that same crazy visual flair. But they did reserve a bit of extra sauce for the NFL team closest to home: The Seattle Seahawks. The flourishes there display nods to Native American art. Otherwise, the other teams got only minimal refreshes, though you can bet that we’ll soon see redesigns rolling out in force--especially given all the positive buzz that’s surfaced from players such as Jermichael Finley saying that the Seahawks unis are the "best in the league."
Click Image To Enlarge
Tech-wise, the uniforms are something Nike calls the Elite 51, a “body-led” design that utilized heat mapping, sweat mapping, and motion capture “to understand exactly what the athlete needs and where they exactly need it,” according to Todd Van Horne, Nike’s creative director of football and baseball.
Click Images To Enlarge
The uniforms are made out of super lightweight fabric that’s woven to stretch equally well in any direction, while stretching as tight as possible over padding, to reduce grab-points for opponents. Nike Pro Combat, the uniform’s base layer system, is outfitted with a raised honeycomb construction, which likewise is meant to conform to a opposing player’s hit. In addition, the pads themselves are placed a bit more intelligently, so that the base layer doesn’t constrain airflow to places that give off the most heat, "so you get airflow from underneath and around the torso and exiting out the lumbar area,” Van Horne tells Co.Design.
Last come the hands and feet. Players will get new cleats; gloves display the team logos (a move that first appeared in the Oregon Ducks uniforms), and the socks have padding for arch support and texturing at the heel, to lock them in place once a player’s cleats are on.
Its all clever stuff. But clearly, the real news is yet to come--Reebok was never able to make a uniform redesign into a major event, but Nike probably can. We’re hoping to see a design war as teams begin trying to outdo each other, backed by Nike’s design might.
COMMENTARY: The Seattle Seahawks uniforms are really, really ugly, and their fans have a very, very bad team. The San Francisco 49ers beat them twice in 2011, and the Niner uniforms are the best in the NFC West.
While we are on the subject. Here's a great video of the exciting S.F. 49er 36-32 win over the New Orleans Saints in the NFC playoffs. Who Dat? Enjoy.
It really pisses me off that the New Orleans Saints coaching staff paid out bounty rewards to its players if they hurt or knocked certain 49er players out of the game during the 2011 season NFC playoffs.
The NFL came down hard on the New Orleans Saints on Wednesday, March 20, for their pay-for-pain bounty system. Football Insider’s Mark Maske has a comprehensive breakdown of the Saints punishment according a knowledgeable NFL insider:
- New Orleans Saints Coach Sean Payton was suspended for one year.
- General Manager Mickey Loomis was suspended for eight months.
- Defensive coordinator Gregg Williams was suspended indefinitely for a bounty system that provided the team’s players payments for hits that injured opponents.
- The Saints were fined $500,000.
- The Saints lose two second-round draft choices, one in this year’s draft and one in 2013.
Who Dat, punkasses?
Courtesy of an article dated April 6, 2012 appearing in Fast Company Design and an article dated March 21, 2012 appearing in The Washington Post
Hi,
Thanks for the insightful post, i believe this is a good inspiration for my on blog posts, in my franchising blog.
Posted by: Jorge Limpezas | 01/22/2013 at 03:08 PM