Patriots Unveil New Uniforms

[IceCap]

1 hour ago, Bobster said:

They're not even the most successful dynasty in the history of Massachusetts pro sports.

Nineteen years of sustained championship contention/divisional dominance and six Super Bowls is pretty damn unprecedented. The only sustained run that I can think of that matches it in North America would be the Montreal Canadiens of the 1950s-1970s? And that one has a lot of qualifiers to consider. 

Yes, the Celtics had their run too, but come on. The Patriots held a death grip on their division and were yearly championship contenders for nearly two decades in the era of salary caps and free agency.

That's far more impressive than anything the Celtics did back in the 60s.

 

1 hour ago, Bobster said:

And the red Pat Patriot uniform is the best they've ever worn. 

In your opinion. 

To me it looks generic, is pretty nonsensical from a historical perspective, and represents the years when the team was a punchline. 

 

 

[RedSox44]

For most of the Celtics dynasty the league had nine teams. All but one year they were facing the Lakers or the Hawks in the finals, too — and a lot of those series went six or seven games!

 

What the Patriots accomplished since 2001 is unfathomable in the modern era, where parity is designed into every facet of the league. It is astonishing that anyone could claim that the 60s Celtics were more impressive.

[Froob]

4 hours ago, RedSox44 said:

For most of the Celtics dynasty the league had nine teams. All but one year they were facing the Lakers or the Hawks in the finals, too — and a lot of those series went six or seven games!

 

What the Patriots accomplished since 2001 is unfathomable in the modern era, where parity is designed into every facet of the league. It is astonishing that anyone could claim that the 60s Celtics were more impressive.

The Celtics won so many game 7s it’s ridiculous. Those teams were incredible. There weren’t many teams but there also was multiple hall of famers on every team, there was no punching bags like the Cavs or Bulls. 11 in 13 is wild.

[BBTV]

Another thing about Pat Patriot - he's a white character who is fighting for slave owners*.  I'm not sure I'd feel good about telling a team comprised of mostly African Americans to play with a logo that is intentionally designed to be white, is representative of an era where blacks had few rights and were mostly slaves, and is designed to market to white people.

 

My opinion here isn't just for the Patriots - I think that race shouldn't be depicted in logos for this very reason.  You have a team of white and black (and some other) players.  It doesn't make sense to base your team around a mascot representative of one race.

 

*I'm not saying the British didn't have slaves, just that the "patriots" did.  And while the soldiers fighting probably weren't owners themselves, they were fighting for people that were.

[Carolingian Steamroller]

21 minutes ago, BringBackTheVet said:

Another thing about Pat Patriot - he's a white character who is fighting for slave owners*.  I'm not sure I'd feel good about telling a team comprised of mostly African Americans to play with a logo that is intentionally designed to be white, is representative of an era where blacks had few rights and were mostly slaves, and is designed to market to white people.

 

My opinion here isn't just for the Patriots - I think that race shouldn't be depicted in logos for this very reason.  You have a team of white and black (and some other) players.  It doesn't make sense to base your team around a mascot representative of one race.

 

*I'm not saying the British didn't have slaves, just that the "patriots" did.  And while the soldiers fighting probably weren't owners themselves, they were fighting for people that were.

 

Interesting thought. What if you redesigned the Pat Patriot logo to be a Union Army soldier. Maybe one dressed similarly to the 54th Massachusetts Infantry? I don't think anyone can claim they weren't patriotic. 

[WSU151]

1 hour ago, BringBackTheVet said:

My opinion here isn't just for the Patriots - I think that race shouldn't be depicted in logos for this very reason. 

 

So the Raiders should change their logo? What should it be?

[GhostOfNormMacdonald]

1 hour ago, BringBackTheVet said:

I think that race shouldn't be depicted in logos for this very reason.

How would you do the Vikings? You know, the scandinavian warriors?

[Pharos04]

Feels like that just opened up an unneeded can of worms that will eventually dip into Redskins territory

[The_Admiral]

2 hours ago, BringBackTheVet said:

Another thing about Pat Patriot - he's a white character who is fighting for slave owners*. 

 

True. But also consider that they play outside Boston, and that the Irish were slaves too, chief.

[TBGKon]

Let's reel this in a little bit, please try to keep conversation to the topic at hand.

[MJWalker45]

2 hours ago, BringBackTheVet said:

Another thing about Pat Patriot - he's a white character who is fighting for slave owners*.  I'm not sure I'd feel good about telling a team comprised of mostly African Americans to play with a logo that is intentionally designed to be white, is representative of an era where blacks had few rights and were mostly slaves, and is designed to market to white people.

 

My opinion here isn't just for the Patriots - I think that race shouldn't be depicted in logos for this very reason.  You have a team of white and black (and some other) players.  It doesn't make sense to base your team around a mascot representative of one race.

 

*I'm not saying the British didn't have slaves, just that the "patriots" did.  And while the soldiers fighting probably weren't owners themselves, they were fighting for people that were.

I don't agree with this idea, mainly because the team is in Massachusetts and not the Carolinas. I'll end my opinion here.

[SFGiants58]

2 minutes ago, the admiral said:

 

True. But also consider that they play outside Boston, and that the Irish were slaves too, chief.

 

Heh, the old Irish-American persecution complex, which survived the "promotion" of their immigrant group to "white" status. 

 

Well, plenty of people classify the Potato Famine as a "genocide by neglect." It's where the English learned a lot of their philosophies that were later adopted in colonial ventures during the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. Granted, it also set the standard for messy post-colonial issues and populace division, something that became far more extreme in places like Kenya, South Asia, and the Caribbean.

 

But back to the issue of the Patriots and slavery, it was never a particularly popular form of labor in New England. By 1789, Massachusetts (including Maine) and Vermont had fully abolished slavery. The other New England states (New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Rhode Island) had installed gradual abolition, meaning no new slaves could be imported and in some cases the emancipation of slaves' children. Granted, New England benefited from slavery in the South (raw materials for factories and other products), but it's not like slavery was as big a cultural force north of Maryland.

[IceCap]

23 minutes ago, TBGKon said:

Let's reel this in a little bit, please try to keep conversation to the topic at hand.

This wasn't a suggestion. 

[BBTV]

I think we're good, I shouldn't have worded my post as strongly as I did, and hadn't really given much thoughts to any other logos.  I'll move on from that.

 

So I'll rephrase it as "while Elvis is far from a great logo, I'd rather them leave Pat in the past, and would prefer them to replace Elvis as well."

 

That being said, I think we've beaten the whole Patriots topic to death - I'm not sure there's anything more to discuss about the uniforms until they start wearing them, I'm not sure there's any more to be gained from the redcoats debate, and nothing good will come out of the can of worms that I cracked open, so...

 

... remember that time they almost moved to Hartford?  I think that's all that's left.

[BBTV]

Or, to keep it on logos/uniforms, what would be a human-less logo that they could use that would work on a helmet, sleeves, and merch?  Something that would be better than Elvis, but not look like it was from the '60s (or ideally, not from any specific era).  They used the tricorn (or bicorn?) hat for a while, but I'm not sure there's a good way to modernize that, and I don't like wearing a hat on a hat.

[Gothamite]

I don't mind a hat-on-a-hat; doesn't bother me with the Orioles' logo. I'm still hoping for a Brewers Barrelman alternate, and he wears a cap too.

 

May be an unpopular opinion, but I still think that Patriots' tricorner logo was the best one they've ever worn.

 

 

It was even better without the numbers.

 

 

[The_Admiral]

1 hour ago, BringBackTheVet said:

... remember that time they almost moved to Hartford?  I think that's all that's left.

 

I found myself reading about that a few days ago because I was thinking about the Whalers and where they even could have built a new arena if they tried (joke's on us, they were never going to try). Hartford is a very strange city to me in that it seems to have the same "things just occurring for no specific reason" approach to city planning as a big southern city, but it's compressed into a tiny, New England-sized municipality (take one step to the left or right and you're in West Hartford or East Hartford, separate cities). End result is that it's really hard to look around and find a parcel of land that could fit a new arena, unless they tore the old Civic Center down and put the new one there. 

 

https://www.si.com/nfl/2017/01/23/nfl-new-england-patriots-abandoned-move-hartford-connecticut

 

The site for the Patriots was about as good as it was gonna get for Hartford, which was along the riverfront upon demolishing a power plant. Kraft made up some :censored:-and-bull story about the plant being too hard for the state to demolish for him as cover for staying in Mass, which was what he always wanted to do in the first place. The state ended up building a convention center on part of the parcel, though they've left the plant there, so now there's a nice new convention center next to a big ugly power plant, which again, place doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

 

If the state had built a UConn/Whalers arena there instead and actually tried to imagine some sort of development around it, maybe that would have worked, but an NFL stadium on that site seems like it was always a pipe dream: the site is a little under 20 acres, which can't come close to Foxboro, the Meadowlands, or the Philly Designated Sports Containment Zone in terms of places to park and tailgate. Of course, Foxboro is in many ways a dumb place to put a stadium, but at least it's roughly 35 miles to Boston and Providence and can still function as a Boston/New England team. Being 90 miles to Boston and New York makes considerably less sense. You'd functionally be a Hartford-New Haven team at that point, and on the heels of losing Los Angeles to St. Louis and Houston to Memphis, it doesn't surprise me at all that the other owners would find a way to step in and make sure this didn't happen (though again, I don't believe it was ever more than an extremely long bluff).

 

Upshot: a whale in the hand is worth a patriot in the bush

[BBTV]

6 minutes ago, Gothamite said:

I don't mind a hat-on-a-hat; doesn't bother me with the Orioles' logo. I'm still hoping for a Brewers Barrelman alternate, and he wears a cap too.

 

May be an unpopular opinion, but I still think that Patriots' tricorner logo was the best one they've ever worn.

 

...

 

It was even better without the numbers.

 

 

 

That's not even a good hat.  When I look at the bottom photo, I see a stretched out horseshoe in front of a blue background.  I'd need the full context to know what it was supposed to be.

[-Akronite-]

12 hours ago, IceCap said:

Nineteen years of sustained championship contention/divisional dominance and six Super Bowls is pretty damn unprecedented. The only sustained run that I can think of that matches it in North America would be the Montreal Canadiens of the 1950s-1970s? And that one has a lot of qualifiers to consider. 

 

The Duncan era San Antonio Spurs are absolutely comparable. 5 titles out of 6 Finals berths over 15 seasons, 18 straight 50+ wins season (6 seasons of 60+), still haven't been out of the playoffs since 1997, revolutionized the league with their utilization of international players, and a constant example of a well-run team that maximizes talent. Not to mention they've been doing it during a decades-long span of the Western conference being obviously stronger than the East.

 

It is amazing the amount of great teams that have come and gone while these two continued to be a dominant presence.

 

In regards to 60s Celtics v modern Pats, I'd argue based on where the leagues are that the latter is more impressive. 

[Jojopeligreeno]

would love to see an updated drawing if the tri corner hat