This 'Clownish' Helmet Has Come to Anchor the Bengals Brand

Bruce Claypool, a designer who worked for NFL Properties in 1981, has spent some time this week thinking about his most well-known creation: the Cincinnati Bengals helmet. The Bengals are preparing for their third appearance in the Super Bowl, which will be played on Sunday in Claypool’s hometown of Los Angeles. And the fact that the Bengals are playing his boyhood team, the LA Rams, stirs memories beyond fandom. The Rams helmet is covered by the image of curling, ready-for-battle battering horns from dome to ear holes. Coincidentally, this wrap-style design was Claypool’s inspiration for the Bengals helmet. While he inherited the idea of horizontal black stripes as a design possibility from the team’s earlier mock-ups, “I had a blank canvas to work with," Claypool said. "I wanted to make the design and helmet work together.” Forty years later, the black stripes and shiny orange base on the Bengals helmet have stood the test of time as the anchor for the team’s brand. The Bengals uniform shirts and pants have been refreshed over the years, but the helmet is too iconic to mess with—even in this age where tweaking designs is relatively easy due to sophisticated software that wasn’t around in ’81. “I used very rudimentary tools while working on that helmet for about two or three months,” Claypool recalled. “I designed it with the helmet in my actual hand. I drew on the helmet with an erasable black oil marker. We went through different versions before finding a design everyone [with the NFL and Bengals] liked and wanted to go with.” How Will Brands Know If Their Super Bowl Ads Worked? The designer worked in New York City in those days, and he didn’t mail a compact disc much less email a file to Cincinnati to get the team’s feedback. He air-mailed the entire helmet prototype to the Bengals to gain their stamp of approval. Send in the clowns Claypool, who estimated his NFL Properties salary back then was between $3,000 and $4,000 a month, never got a bonus for the successful design or a royalty check. Instead, he got the claim on what has become not only one of the NFL’s most memorable brands, but also a design that sparks hot takes. “A lot of people thought it was just clownish-looking [in ‘81],” said Paul Lukas, publisher of Uni Watch, a website for sports uniforms enthusiasts. “I was one of those people—and still am today.” Jack Brennan was a young sportswriter for the Memphis Press-Scimitar in late summer of ‘81, helping lay out the newspaper one day and going over the photo options that were coming across the wire. He was struck by a shot of the Bengals’ new striped helmet being worn by punter and wide receiver Pat McInally. “I said, ‘Well, that’s about the coolest helmet I have ever seen,’” Brennan explained. “And I put that photo in the newspaper.” This editorial decision foreshadowed Brennan’s future, as he went on to be a Bengals beat writer for the Cincinnati Enquirer in the mid-1980s and early '90s before becoming the team’s PR director for two decades afterward. He retired in 2016 and gained a strong sense along the way about how the masses felt about the helmet. “It has always been a source of debate,” Brennan said. “Some people like it, and others don’t.” Lukas, one of the latter folks, balanced his personal view with that of the people who matter most, saying, “The prevailing fan sentiment has definitely shifted over the years from it being clownish-looking or a joke to being ‘a modern classic.’” Innovating beyond a logo National Football League brands have historically been built on a logo that adorns one or both sides of their helmets. The Dallas Cowboys lush star logo, the Pittsburgh Steelers badge-like insignia—which was borrowed from the American Iron and Steel Institute—and the Minnesota Vikings medieval horn are classic examples. These logos are set in the middle of the helmet while being surrounded by a dominant color. It’s a standard NFL design. The Rams in 1948, and the Bengals 30 years later, innovated from that logo-driven norm by treating the entire helmet like a canvas. Neither team has looked back since. The Bengals franchise was started in 1967 by Paul Brown, the legendary owner-coach who previously founded the Cleveland Browns in the first half of the 20th century. The Browns, under Brown and others, have always been aesthetically bland. For the Bengals' first 14 years, Brown’s upstart Cincy team looked a lot like, well, the Browns. The original Bengals helmet was decidedly not fancy, consisting of an all-orange base with the team's name in a sans serif font. The rest of the uniform was also extremely basic. “They stole the Browns’ look,” said Bob Dorfman, a San Francisco-based sports marketing analyst who grew up in Cleveland. “Then, the Bengals went from a kind of low-key look to tiger stripes. And the rest is history.” Earning ‘Super’ stripes The Bengals and Browns still share a brand trait, albeit an unfortunate one: They are among the 12 NFL teams who have yet to win a Super Bowl. Going into this season, the Bengals franchise valuation was roughly $2.2 billion, which ranked second-to-last in the NFL. That assessment, though, was before their second-year quarterback, Joe Burrow, led them to the AFC Championship. “Cincinnati is a smaller market but has a solid future with Burrow as their quarterback,” Dorfman said. “If they win the Super Bowl, their valuation could jump about 10 spots in the rankings.” Which will mean tens of millions of dollars of tiger-striped merchandise being sold to fans old and new. In other words, a lot of bank for the Bengals. The man most responsible for the team’s helmet, Claypool, like so many Americans, plans to watch the Big Game with a few friends this weekend. Now an instructor at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif., the native Angeleno and childhood Rams fan apparently never lost the stripes he picked up back in his NFL design days. “I am rooting for the Bengals,” Claypool said. How HBCUs Are Schooling Major Brands in Marketing Deals

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This 'Clownish' Helmet Has Come to Anchor the Innovative Bengals Brand

The designer for Cincinnati's headgear gets the last laugh as they go head-to-head against the LA Rams in Super Bowl 56

Christopher Heine

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Christopher Heine