The Eagles on Saturday finally unveiled their kelly green alternate jerseys.
Here’s the first glimpse as the new throwback threads:
The kelly green jerseys and gear will go on sale on Monday at 9 a.m. and all three Eagles pro shop locations at Lincoln Financial Field, Cherry Hill, New Jersey, and Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
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This has been a long time coming.
Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie has wanted to bring back these jerseys as an alternate for several years and announced at the NFL owners meetings in March that this would officially be the year.
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“This is the season we’ll reintroduce the classic kelly green and I’m super excited,” Lurie said in Phoenix in March. “I don’t know what date that’s going to be but I think fans will love it. It’s why we’re bringing it back. We really took the feedback seriously over the years. The first moment we could get the kelly green helmet approved, we’ll finally be able to see it on the field.”
While midnight green will remain the Eagles’ standard, fans have been clamoring for these throwback jerseys for years. The Eagles wore kelly green from 1935-1995, before switching to midnight green in 1996, a couple years after Lurie bought the franchise.
Back in June of 2021, the NFL announced a rule change that would allow teams two different helmets beginning with the 2022 season. That had been the major hurdle in the way to bringing back these jerseys for the Eagles. Lurie wanted to use kelly green as an alternate but wanted a kelly green helmet to match and didn’t want to settle for using decals. And the thought of a kelly green jersey and a midnight green helmet simply didn’t work.
While the rule changed in time for the 2022 season, the Eagles spent extra time working with Nike to recreate the kelly green because it didn’t exist in Nike’s current color palette. So for the 2022 season, the Eagles took advantage by making an alternate black helmet.
Lurie has previously said he hopes the rule will continue to change, allowing two alternate helmets. That way the Eagles could have a kelly green alternate and a black alternate in the same season. As of March, Lurie said he was still hoping that will eventually happen.
Bringing back kelly green has been a mission of Lurie’s dating back many seasons. In fact, here’s what he said about the possibility of bringing back the jerseys all the way back in 2018:
“They know that with the Eagles, it’s important to us. We really want to be able to have kelly green jerseys at times and to make it look really right, you need to have matching helmets.”
Five years later, it’s finally happening.
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