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Will NFL's 'Color Rush' jerseys drive color-blind viewers nuts again?

Eric Edholm

The NFL has welcomed back its “Color Rush” jerseys, which is some sort of marketing tool to sell more jerseys. At least the money is going to charity.

But will it improve the viewer experience? We’re specifically thinking about roughly 1/12 of the audience.

Last season, the league rolled these jerseys out for its slate of Thursday night games, and a funny thing happened when the New York Jets and Buffalo Bills met in mid-November: The all-red Bills jerseys and all-green jerseys drove color-blind viewers absolutely batty.

This …

Color-blind viewers struggled with the Bills' and Jets'
Color-blind viewers struggled with the Bills’ and Jets’ “Color Rush” jerseys last November. (AP)

… became this for some people:

How color-blind viewers saw the uniforms of the Bills and Jets (AP).
How color-blind viewers saw the uniforms of the Bills and Jets (AP).

You can see how that might be troublesome.

Approximately 8 percent of males, who need only one X-chromosome to be defective to be color blind, suffer from the inability to differentiate some colors easily. Color blindness is a tricky thing to explain to people who don’t suffer from it, but one viewer last season said both teams looked “grey with white trim … the two teams basically blended together.”

Can you imagine?

Well, good news, y’all — “Color Rush” is back and improved for 2016! Purchase yours at at NFL Shop near you or online. Certainly they fixed this Christmas-y, red-and-green nightmare, right?

Um …

So … still red and green? Well, that’s what we thought. It turns out that this picture had the wrong colors on it for the game itself; there are the alternate jerseys. It appears the Jets will be all-white. So you get that slight variation.

And the NFL reportedly consulted with color-blindness experts before putting these out. Kudos to them for that.

We looked at the rest of the Thursday night matchups and can’t see any other potential conflicts for the poor color-blind folks. Did we miss any? Anyone who is color-blind — anything we should know about?

We feel for you. And maybe the NFL does, too.

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Eric Edholm is a writer for Shutdown Corner on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at edholm@yahoo-inc.com or follow him on Twitter!