The NFL is a business. Its merchandising is an economy unto itself.
That puts pressure on each franchise to find a jersey that not only looks great on the field, but flies off retail racks when worn by a superstar. For some teams, like the Kansas City Chiefs or New York Giants or Las Vegas Raiders, they’ve got decades of classic looks on which to fall back and made few tweaks along the way. Others have fallen victim to trends in their years of existence, creating a spectrum of uniforms that may never rise above “average.”
Let’s talk about the deep end of that spectrum. The jerseys that embody the worst trends, whether they’re leaning into non-sensical highlights and patches or glorifying old uniforms that were abandoned for good reason. Let’s talk about the worst jersey all 32 NFL teams have ever worn.
First, a rule. We’re only dealing with post AFL-NFL merger kits, so there won’t be anything before 1970 included here unless a team has worn it as a throwback since. And there may be too much appreciation for the clean simplicity of the 1970s and 1980s, as those older jerseys don’t show up too often. Finally, this list would have been significantly less thorough without the incredible work of the Gridiron Uniform Database, which is an encyclopedia of pro football uniforms across a wide range of leagues and years.
Let’s roll through our worst jerseys in alphabetical order.
