The NFL and the color pink
If you’ve watched any professional football in October you might have noticed large swaths of a color that usually doesn’t make it onto the gridiron – pink. See, October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. The NFL and the American Cancer Society teamed up on a campaign called A Crucial Catch to raise money for breast cancer screening and education.
The goal of the campaign is great. The execution is awful. Now, please don’t get me wrong: I fully support the collaboration and I think the goal of raising awareness for breast cancer is clearly succeeding. I am a cancer survivor and I truly believe that campaigns like this one play a critical role in raising money for research and education. The problem is, the output of this particular campaign is ugly and disjointed.
The primary issue is the lack of uniformity. They’re called uniforms for a reason. It’s no surprise that losing this uniformity creates a visual mess. Some players wear pink shoes while others wear pink gloves. There’s pink mouth guards, pink undershirts, pink towels, pink chinstraps, pink sweatbands, and every conceivable combination of the above mentioned items. I haven’t even gotten into what people are wearing on the sidelines. The result looks like Barbie threw up the contents of her Play House onto a football field.
There’s another kind of uniformity worth mentioning as well. The goal of the campaign is to show that the NFL as a whole, as a family, supports everyone whose lives have been affected by breast cancer. As it stands now, some players have pink everywhere and some have none. The subtext feels a bit like the players and coaches who wear a ton of pink really care, while the players who wear a little are indifferent. Again, a uniform approach does a much better job of showing the support of the NFL as a whole.
This all feels very ad hoc for an organization like the NFL, known for paying attention to the details. So make all the team logos pink. Make all the names and numbers on the jerseys pink. Have the home team wear pink from head to toe. How about actually spending the time to tastefully integrate pink into the uniforms? Nike, the maker of all NFL uniforms, would be all over it.
The spirit and commitment to the cause are absolutely fantastic and I don’t want to detract from it in any way. With that said, next October wouldn’t it be nice to see Pink well integrated instead of crudely applied?
