The start of another NFL season is officially upon us. After scooping up tickets for a December game against my hometown Steelers at the very moment they released to sitting 2 rows back from the field for my first ever preseason game, I’m excited to see what the Bengals can do this year. There are a lot of questions up in the air between the health of Joe Burrow and the contract for Ja’Marr Chase, but regardless of all of that it’ll be nice to have something to dictate my mood every week.
A great part to the start of any sports season, though, is that is gives a terrific excuse to buy new hats. While this is The Geeky Blinders and I’m a huge fan of flat caps (I ordered my first one in a while last week that I’m looking forward to getting!), I also frequently wear caps for various Cincinnati sports teams. Every year for the NFL, there are a multitude of hats that come out as the season gets underway, including hats for the NFL draft, hats for the preseason, and sideline hats worn by coaches, support staff, and inactive players during the games. Last year’s sideline hat was really classy, in my opinion:
They just look clean, the team crest in the center is nice, and generally it’s a pretty unique hat. They looked great across the whole spectrum of teams, too, with the crest capturing the logo of each team and the team colors being nicely represented without being either too loud or too boring.
I had high hopes for the hats this year because the first ones to be revealed were the draft hats… and they certainly delivered:
The colors are super unique, and I love the idea of the hat being mostly grayscale on the front other than the accent colors highlighting the logo. The “Who Dey!” patch on the side is a bit larger than I’d like, but it’s still a cool look. I had to buy one of these immediately.
Next up were the training hats released during preseason. They were… less exciting:
It’s not bad, but it doesn’t feel very interesting; it’s literally just a white hat with a white logo. These honestly felt extremely average across every team. While it seemed like it was going for the same idea as the draft hats — same base color scheme for every team and then accent colors that are team-specific — it just didn’t execute well because the abundance of white is a bit too basic. I didn’t feel even remotely compelled to add one to my collection. I figured the sideline hats would turn things back around, but… no.
Similar to the preseason hat, it just feels… boring. The color pattern is interesting, but other than that it’s more of the same. The colors running down under the logo are a nice touch, but beyond that it honestly doesn’t feel very unique. All of the sideline hats also come in a gray variant, which I think looks a little better (though I’m also extremely partial to gray in general), but still not enough to warrant a purchase:
This did get me thinking, though, that perhaps the issue is really with so much of the standard hat being black. While the body of the 2023 hat was also black, the orange peak set it off. I looked at the hats for some teams with more fun color options, and I immediately liked what I saw:
You had better believe if I was a fan of one of these teams that I would’ve snatched one up already. Revisiting teams with colors that lend themselves to a black base, they all similarly look extremely average:
In the long run it’s fine because I certainly don’t actually need any more hats considering I have half a dozen Bengals hats already… on top of my Reds hats, FC Cincinnati hats, and flat caps. It’s always fun to look, though!