Why Chiefs won’t be changing uniforms anytime soon

Kansas City will likely continue to take the traditional approach with their uniforms.

A total of seven teams are slated to have changes to their uniforms for the 2020 NFL season, but you can rest assured the Kansas City Chiefs won’t be joining these teams soon, if at all.

The Los Angeles Rams, Los Angeles Chargers and Indianapolis Colts all have planned logo and uniform changes for 2020. The New England Patriots and Cleveland Browns have yet to reveal their planned uniform changes, but the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the Atlanta Falcons have recently revealed their new uniforms to the world.

You can take a look at both of those uniform reveals from the NFC South down below:

If the Chiefs Kingdom is hoping to see the team follow other franchises and redesign their logo or jersey, they’re going to be disappointed. In April of 2018, Chiefs team president Mark Donovan spoke with ESPN’s Adam Teicher about the potential for any changes to the uniform in Kansas City.

“If history holds true with the Hunt family, you’re not going to see many changes to the uniform — nor would I argue for them, by the way,” Donovan said, via Adam Teicher of ESPN. “One of the things that makes our brand equity not unique but valuable is that we’re one of the very few that stuck to that tradition and honor that tradition.”

The biggest difference to the Chiefs’ uniforms lately really wasn’t much of a change. They added their logo celebrating their 60th season as a small helmet decal during the 2019 season. Team history is one of the things that has long inspired this fanbase. They also wore the NFL 100 logo in 2019, like every other team across the league.

“You get into the Thursday night color debate and you’re going to get strong opinions from a lot of different views on that,” Donovan continued. “I actually like what we’ve done with the Thursday night games. I like the all-white [look]. I like the all-red. We’ve done some subtle things with socks to create our own take on it. I like that.

“I love some of the other teams’ jerseys and uniforms. I don’t like some of the other jerseys and uniforms on Thursday night. When you talk specifically about, ‘Could you sell more (jerseys by wearing alternate uniforms or changing the base uniform)?’ we have a lot of jerseys for sale that we don’t necessarily wear on the field: black jerseys, camo jerseys, red jerseys, white jerseys. There are a bunch of different color feels to that.”

As for alternate uniforms, the team periodically wears red-on-red and white-on-white color combinations, usually during big primetime matchups or Thursday night football. They wore their typical home red uniforms in Super Bowl LIV as the designated home team.

There’s likely an argument to be made that Kansas City could rope in some new fans and make some quick cash from jersey sales with a uniform change. The reality is that changing the uniform significantly would be a blemish to a franchise steeped in tradition.

“I think it’s more important to us from a brand standpoint,” Donovan said, “that we’re traditional.”