Have you seen the Chicago Bears’ new“Rivalries” uniforms put out by Nike? My first reaction was that they finally found a good pairing for that orange helmet they came out with a couple years ago. It’s got some fun wrinkles – the vertical stripes, the orange pants, awesome socks. The patch… yeah, sure, let’s throw a patch on there, I guess. We’ll wait to give an official verdict when they play a game with these new duds, but they pass the initial test.
However, the real headliner isn’t even on the jersey – it’s the glow-up Nike gave the best logo in team history from the 1940s and 1950s. The bear on top of a giant orange football… or a tiny bear on a regular-sized football? Open to interpretation. Either way, the Bears started using that logo near the end of their greatest stretch in franchise history, led by Hall of Fame quarterback Sid Luckman paired with Hall of Fame coach George Halas.
I say glow up because Nike smartly added “CHICAGO” inside the football, and the result is perfection.
The Bears used that old logo as their primary marker for a generation before they adopted a white “C” to put on the side of their helmets in 1962. The white C turned orange in 1974 and is used to this day as the primary logo on helmets. The current bear head arrived in 1999 as the secondary logo, taking over as the primary for merchandise (but not the helmet, unfortunately) starting in 2023.
I’ll save my discussion for another day on the need to refresh the brand every generation or two so that you can revisit eras like Nike did with this upcycled logo. It’s a lonely hill I’ll defend some other time.
For now, I just want to reflect on this awesome logo and what it could mean to us Bears fans in the future. The “Rivalries Logo” enters the scene on the eve of the most anticipated season in quite some time. Chicago has been chasing the combination of elite coaching and quarterback play since Luckman and Halas left the sidelines. While we’ve only read the first chapter of the Ben Johnson-Caleb Williams book, most Bears fans agree that it is going to be a page turner.
If this Johnson-Williams pairing takes the Bears back to the promised land, this logo will be associated with this newfound success. Much of the new gear that people will buy and wear during this stretch will feature this new logo. It will be in pictures and videos of fans cheering big victories. It will become part of the backdrop and good vibes will follow when Bears fans see the logo in the wild.
Maybe I’m stretching here.
Maybe I’m wish-casting, trying to pull some magic from a bygone era forward to the modern day.
Maybe there isn’t any significance to the timing of a fresh logo besides the hit to my bank account over the next few months.
But maybe, just maybe, this all adds up to something special on the lakefront.
Put the ball on the tee and let’s ****ing go.
