2016: The Orange Color Rush Uniforms

Let’s go back to September 16th, 2016 – a day in which the Miami Dolphins introduced their brand new all-orange color rush uniform set.

If you aren’t familiar with the Color Rush, check out this article from NFL.com – complete with every teams Color Rush set.

For Miami, they opted to lean heavily on the color orange. Heavily as in entirely.

What’s noteworthy – and memorable – about these units is not that the team went with orange, but rather the particular shade of orange they leaned into. Unfortunately, that very shade of orange – reminiscent of a certain cheesy snack – didn’t go over to well on social media.

If I had to venture a guess, I’d say that had these been closer in color to the early 2000’s orange sets, pictured below, they probably would have been very popular.

Also – it’s worth noting that I do understand why orange was the choice. It makes sense that they didn’t lean heavily into aqua as it was – and is – their primary home set. And an all-white color rush wouldn’t work either because it is/was the primary away-set, except in September of course.

So, orange was, really, the only choice that would still scream Dolphins football.

Which makes me wonder if this one game – yes, they only wore them once, on September 29th, 2016 – had such an impact on them that it led to the change of the orange entirely.

As I shared in a previous article, the team would go on to refresh their primary orange with one that is significantly more saturated and far more, well, orange just two years later (the first year they were eligible to do so).

I guess we’ll never know.

Either way, if you have one of these Color Rush jerseys lying around, it’s safe to say it’ll probably be a rarer collectors item in the years ahead.