Patriots vs. Falcons is also a battle of best throwback jerseys

Everyone knows Super Bowl LI will feature two of the league’s best quarterbacks when Tom Brady and Matt Ryan square off. What fewer people know, thanks to the constant cycle of rebranding and uniform changes, is that the Patriots and Falcons would have looked much, much better in 1966.

New England and Atlanta are home to two of the league’s finest throwback uniforms; blocky, solid-color jerseys with iconic logos and complementary colors. They’re the opposite of color rush and a tried-and-true design victory that still looks good 50 years later.

Each team joined the NFL in the 1960s and needed to make a splash to convert new boosters to the sidelines. Fans in New England, left without many geographical alternatives, often turned to the Giants to fill that void. The closest team to Atlanta before the franchise’s first game in 1966 was Washington, leaving the college game as king. Creating a viable — and most importantly, cool-looking — identity was paramount to establishing this new identity.

The Falcons’ original uniforms were meant to represent something for everyone in the Peach State. The NFL had a new major market to conquer but understood there was no way to pry rabid fans from the colleges they’d watched every Saturday for the previous decade. Instead, the franchise worked to find a common ground and add an extra day of football to Georgian schedules.

The red and black appealed to the University of Georgia fans from border to border. The white and gold was for the Georgia Tech boosters centered in Atlanta. The result was an old-school mash-up that sounded garish on paper but looked sweet on the turf.

But Atlanta isn’t alone in abandoning some of the finest throwbacks the league has to offer. The Patriots’ luck as a franchise changed after rebranding with their flying Elvis logo, but their rush to distance themselves from the putrid teams of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s discarded a gorgeous uniform in the process.

New England’s old kits were a classic red, white, and blue — red jerseys for away games, white for home — with generous striping across the shoulders. White pants gave way to Adidas-style stripes down the outseam. And the capper, at the very top, was Pat Patriot, a gruff-looking soldier dressed up like a Minuteman or Pawtuxet Ranger. Pat was crouched in a three-point stance, prepared to snap the ball to whichever disappointment the franchise was starting at quarterback those days.

The throwback uniforms are so great, they could make notoriously handsome Tom Brady look like a nerd by comparison.

Maybe that’s why they don’t wear them so often anymore.

On Sunday, they’ll break out the latest in an evolving chain of increasingly generic uniforms and battle to see who will be 2017’s NFL champion. If this game had just happened 50 years earlier, they’d look way better in the process.