Paint me by surprise. Tampa Bay Buccaneers had the first choice to choose their Super Bowl LV uniform combination at their stadium and instead of going with the historically more intimidating red shirts (or pewter), the Bucs opted for white shirts and tin pants in Next sunday. This means that current Super Bowl champion Kansas City Chiefs will be able to wear the same uniforms they wore last year when they won Super Bowl LIV – the well-known red T-shirts and white pants. Do the colors of the shirt really matter? By the smallest of margins, yes.
Last year, I wrote a long article about the first red vs. Super Bowl red. No Super Bowl before last year featured two teams with the dominant color being red. Now it’s happening for the second year in a row. Instead of copying and pasting last year’s story and exchanging 49ers for Buccaneers – that would be self-plagiarism! – I am reformulating the piece in a much shorter one for this year’s Big Game.
The Super Bowl LV is almost here and you can watch it for free on the CBS Sports app.
The color red has been an important color since we understood colors. It means blood, passion, aggression, activity, romance and assertiveness, and its meaning for us as humans can be traced through tens of thousands of years of human evolution. A study over a decade ago showed that judges favor athletes who wear red, perceiving them as more dominant.
Last year, I asked Mark Frank, author of a study on the impact of jersey colors on sports, and Russell Hill, professor of evolutionary anthropology, if the Chiefs wearing red would have an advantage over the 49ers in white.
“Let’s see. How can I express it? Yes, but it’s just tiny,” said Frank. “It has a slight advantage, but an unfortunate fumble ends that advantage. An unfortunate pass. An arm being hit during the launch is likely to nullify any advantage it may be.”
Hill agrees, and does so while painting a picture of Sunday night.
“The way we would probably expect it to work anyway is not preparation for the game, but on the field itself … athletes on the line of scrimmage, in opposition to each other. They are facing each other when the ball is thrown” Said Hill. “I think in those specific contexts where it could have an impact on San Francisco players, those athletes who look at athletes dressed in red, each of them exhibiting this color that has an evolutionary association with power and dominance.
“It is in this particular context and on these very small margins that we expect there to be a difference. If you only take one or two percent of the degree of impact from these players, the energy they put into that and these games are thin margins, which can be enough to tilt the balance between winning and losing. “
Certainly Tom Brady, Bruce Arians and Jason Licht read this story last year. So why did you decide to go against that advice and put yourself at a disadvantage?
I have a few guesses. The first is that the Bucs wore red T-shirts and tin pants in their week 12 defeat at home to the Chiefs (who wore white T-shirts and red pants). In short, they tried it the first time and it didn’t work.
More globally, Buccaneers have been much more successful with white t-shirts than with red or pewter shirts. Tampa Bay has 9-2 in white tops, 3-2 in red tops and 2-1 in tin tops this season.
Specific to this shirt combination, however, Buccaneers are undefeated. The Bucs went 5-0 in white T-shirts and tin pants this year, with wins over the Panthers, Lions, Saints and Packers twice.
Meanwhile, the Chiefs reached 9-2 with red shirts (including 8-2 with red shirts and white pants) and 7-0 with white shirts this year.
And now the decision to wear white shirts is becoming clearer to me. The Bucs avoided any slight subconscious advantage that the red shirts can give them and instead decided to wear the uniform that had the greatest success throughout the season. So they forced the Chiefs to wear a uniform that they had less success with this season, but won a Super Bowl last year, thus creating what could be a false sense of comfort upon entering the game.
Ah yes. The psychology – and reverse psychology – of Super Bowl uniform combinations.