PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Dust off your old kelly green Eagles jersey — unless you’re like many fans who have continued to wear them well after the team made the switch to midnight green in 1996.
The popularity of the kelly green uniforms has not tired. And fortunately for fans, the NFL has opened the possibility of bringing back those uniforms part-time starting in 2022.
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The NFL plans to bring back alternate helmets in 2022 after a nine-year hiatus, which had ordered only one helmet for safety purposes. Teams have to let the league know by the end of July if they want an alternate helmet.
In recent years, Eagles chairman and CEO Jeffrey Lurie, who has owned the team since 1994, expressed a desire to bring back the kelly green uniforms as an alternative, but he didn’t want to do so if it meant wearing the midnight green helmets.
“We want a kelly green helmet to go with the kelly green jerseys,” Lurie said in March 2018, “and we’re trying to get the league to allow a second helmet. … It’s important to us. We really want to be able to have kelly green jerseys at times, and to make it look really right you should have matching helmets.”
The last time the Eagles wore kelly green jerseys was Opening Day 2010 to honor the 50th anniversary of the 1960 NFL champion team.
NOTE: A previous version of this story omitted the fact that teams must let the NFL know by the end of July if they want an alternate helmet.