With New Uniforms, Redskins Voted for Change

Some fans were put off by the burgundy-on-burgundy uniforms the Redskins debuted Monday night, when they ditched the all-white status quo. But let's be honest: If there's one phrase you'll associate with this week 20 years from now, it's probably not going to be "all-white status quo."

"I feel like we needed a change," said Santana Moss, a strong backer of the team's first-ever use of that jersey combination. "We always kind of wanted to do it," Marcus Washington added, "just because we've never done it before."

And if some fans recoiled from that strikingly new color?

"They're just not used to seeing it," Mike Sellers said. "It's change, that's all it is."

So how did this happen? Several players in the locker room had long been lobbying for such an experiment; Carlos Rogers, Fred Smoot, Clinton Portis and Sellers were among the activists. Rogers said they took their case to the captains, who referred them to equipment manager Brad Berlin and Coach Jim Zorn. And the head man's reaction?

"I said, 'Absolutely!' " Zorn said. "You know, maybe for fun, not for some big psych-up thing or psych-out thing. It was just a change of pace for these guys. . . . I want what the players want, from that standpoint. And I think they liked it. How'd you? Did it look kind of funny out there?"

See, that's the thing. I thought it was fun and different and striking; others both in and out of the press box intimated that they thought it was abominable and horrific and ghastly.

"I kind of liked it on some [guys], you know what I mean?" Khary Campbell said. "Some guys pulled it off real nice, like Fred Smoot pulled it off real good. Cornelius Griffin, for a big guy, pulled it off real well. Demetric Evans, Andre Carter. But some of them O-linemen . . . "

"Stunk it up," said Smoot, who was listening in.

"Stunk it up," agreed Campbell, who said it was a harder look for a big man to handle. "I don't know why, either. It just didn't look quite right."

"Some guys just not smooth," Smoot said.

In any case, as you may have heard, the Redskins lost, and the common assumption was that burgundy-on-burgundy did as well. Not so fast.

"Oh no, I'm not superstitious," Zorn said, leaving open the possibility of a return to burgundy. "I'll let the players decide how they want to do that."

"Man, that's something about our coach that I love, he don't look for the alternatives to blame," Smoot said. "If we would have won it would have been better, but I think it looked good."

I didn't find one Redskins player who disliked the experiment, but even the burgundy partisans tempered their enthusiasm, possibly in the spirit of cooperation and acceptance. Or possibly not.

"You know, this game is way farther than what you wear on the field," Moss said. "You line up and you play football, whether you don't have nothing on at all."

"The uniforms don't do nothing," agreed Rogers, who liked the look. "Once that whistle blows, you don't think about your uniform, no matter what colors you're wearing. . . . I mean, it's execution once you go out there. The uniform, once you put that on, that's over. You could be naked and lose, or win. So it don't matter."

Naked football, actually, would constitute change I do not believe in.