It’s hard to notice, but Cowboys fans know it’s there.
Perhaps they spent a little too long staring blankly at the television during, yet, another playoff-less season in Dallas. One game day, they blinked at the screen, furrowed their brow and said, “Hey, the Cowboys’ helmets don’t match their pants.”
It’s true. The Cowboys’ silver helmets are a different shade than their silver pants. You can even look it up: The official Pantone for the helmet is PMS 8240 C while the pants is PMS 8280 C.
It’s a subtle difference, but enough to have one reader ask The Dallas Morning News: When did the Cowboys’ uniform change?
Cowboys
Cowboys uniform history
The Dallas Cowboys, unlike several other NFL teams, have pretty much maintained the same uniform for their entire existence. They’ve really only undergone one significant uniform/helmet change during the franchise’s early existence in the mid-60s.
Their first uniforms closely resembled what they now use as retro or throwback uniforms — you might see them during a Thanksgiving Day game or another special occasion — a white helmet with a blue star, blue home jerseys, white away jerseys and white pants with a blue stripe.
In 1964, they adopted a simpler look, essentially today’s home uniform. They traded the white helmets for a bluish-silver, flip-flopped their home and away jersey colors and changed, for the time being, to bluish-silver pants that matched their bluish-silver helmets.
Wait, why’d they flip home and away?
That one’s easy. It’s hot in Texas.
The Cowboys are one of the only NFL teams to wear white at home, originally designed to build a competitive advantage. Under the September and early-October sun at the Cotton Bowl, the Cowboys’ original home stadium, the dark-colored jerseys absorbed sunlight while white reflected. It didn’t get any cooler when the team moved to Texas Stadium with its giant hole in the roof. So one day the Cowboys simply decided, “Hey, let’s have the other team be the ones playing in stifling-hot uniforms.”
The Cowboys also now mostly wear their home whites on the road against home teams wearing dark jerseys.
What happened to the original silver pants?
Dallas Cowboys 1992 game-worn pearlescent silver pants, sometimes referred to as “seafoam green.” This pair originally belonged to fullback Daryl Johnston.
Courtesy Ebay
The greenish and pearlish “silver” pants worn today, a color sometimes referred to as “seafoam green,” originally stemmed from a quirky obsession developed by Tex Schramm, former Cowboys president and general manager. Schramm saw the interior of a car with a similar color and liked it so much he wanted his football team to wear it. The change was made in the early 1980s.
The funny thing is, television quality was so poor, hardly anyone noticed the mismatched colors for a long time. It wasn’t until TVs switched to high-definition that the subtle difference became more apparent.
Still, the colors have mostly stayed the same. There have been occasional changes in tint — Nike’s pants were even more turquoise-ish when the NFL changed uniform suppliers — but to this day, when the Cowboys take the field, they do it in a slightly mismatched uniform.
Well, why don’t they fix it?
Seems like a simple fix, no?
Well, the greenish-silver pants are said to make the Cowboys’ royal blue accents pop a bit more on TV. And Jerry Jones — owner, president and general manager — seems reluctant to change the team’s base uniform.
“Mr. Jones has always thought of our home uniform as the Yankee pinstripes of baseball,” longtime Cowboys equipment manager Mike McCord said of the iconic Yankees uniforms to Fox Sports in 2017. “You just don’t want to change a whole lot of what that home uniform is, so it’s stayed pretty generic and vanilla with just the white jerseys: one color royal number, simple sleeve stripe, and everything else has stayed pretty basic.”
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