Eagles reveal black alternate helmets for 2022 originally appeared on NBC Sports Philadelphia
The Eagles are going to the dark side.
At least occasionally.
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The Birds on Friday afternoon unveiled their black alternate helmets that they’ll wear with their black jerseys on occasion during the 2022 season. Eventually, the Eagles will bring back kelly green as an alternate in 2023, but this black helmet is a placeholder.
Since the announcement from Jeffrey Lurie in late March, Eagles fans have been eager to see these black helmets.
And … finally, here they are:
“What we’re going to do for this season is to have a black helmet because we have a black jersey,” Lurie said at the owners meetings in March. “And our players love wearing black and they love all black.”
The NFL previously had a rule against having more than one helmet per player, citing safety concerns. The NFL contended that it was safer to have every player fitted correctly for one helmet. But it’s not like this is a fledgling league; it has seemingly unlimited resources. The Eagles had been pushing for this rule to be changed for years.
And in June of 2021, the NFL announced that teams would be allowed to use two different helmets starting in 2022. That had been the hurdle in the way of the Eagles using kelly green as an alternate. They wanted a kelly green helmet to match their kelly green jerseys and Lurie wasn’t willing to settle for a full-helmet decal.
But Lurie explained in March that the Eagles are working with Nike to recreate the kelly green shade, which doesn’t exist in their current color palette. This is apparently a long process, because they don’t expect those jerseys to be ready until the 2023 season. In the meantime, the Eagles are taking advantage of the rule change by introducing a black helmet.
Lurie hopes the rule continues to evolve, allowing the Eagles to have two alternate helmets in 2023 and beyond. That would allow the Eagles to keep their midnight green helmets as their standard but to then have a kelly green and a black helmet as alternates.
But if the rule doesn’t expand, these black helmets will be a one-year thing. Kelly green will return in 2023.
“It’s what our fans have wanted, it’s what we’ve wanted,” Lurie said in March. “And we’re going to be able to introduce that for [the 2023] season.”
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