Saints to wear black helmets in London game vs. Vikings

The #Saints will wear their black helmets for their game in London on Oct. 2 vs. the Vikings!#MINvsNO

Buy Saints Tickets @SeatGeek pic.twitter.com/PYLXUbfHqI
— New Orleans Saints (@Saints) August 9, 2022

We already knew that the New Orleans Saints will be introducing their new alternate helmets during the 2022 season, but now we know the game in which they’ll debut — Oct. 2’s kickoff with the Minnesota Vikings from Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in London.

What still isn’t clear is which uniform the black helmets will be paired with. Distressingly, all of the promo photos taken so far have Cameron Jordan modeling them while wearing his white-and-gold Color Rush uniform (but with black socks, which do not help), suggesting that may be the direction the team wants to take this. And that would be a mistake. While the black buckets may fit New Orleans’ overall color palette, they’d look so much better with matching black jerseys and pants rather than the Color Rush variants, which clashes with them.

So here’s me making the case for the Saints to dust off their black and gold throwback jerseys, which haven’t been used since a 2016 loss to the Detroit Lions; before that, they were worn in a couple of wins back in 2011. This international game (which is technically counted a Saints home game) is a great occasion to roll out a completely new look rather than try and mesh black helmets with white uniforms and ruin both of them. Let’s introduce some visual cohesion, yeah? It tidies up the color palette and brings in a cool message of merging the old (throwback uniforms) with the new (black helmets).

I get the impulse to go with alternate helmets and an alternate uniform, which led the Saints towards putting new black lids on their Color Rush set, but the throwbacks just bring a cleaner aesthetic with those new buckets. Here’s a very sloppy edit I threw together in Microsoft Paint of what that could look like, compared to the Saints’ take with their Color Rush jerseys. What do you think?

Many Bothans died to bring us this crude MS Paint mock-up of what the new black Saints helmets might look like with their throwback jerseys pic.twitter.com/xJQY5nit7h

— John Sigler (@john_siglerr) July 11, 2022