The San Francisco 49ers will have a new look next season… for a couple of games, at least.

Via 247Sports.com we’ve learned that Al Guido, president of the 49ers mentioned the team would be unveiling a new throwback alternate uniform at their annual State of the Franchise event the night of Wednesday, May 23rd during an appearance on KGMZ-FM 95.7 in San Francisco on Tuesday morning.

“It’s been the rumour and I can confirm we will be rolling out, what I would call a ‘throwback alternate’ jersey”, Guido said during the radio programme. “We rolled them out to the team the other day and the reactions were tremendous from the players. Let’s just say our fans are really going to appreciate the throwback nature of the jersey.”

The news of the 49ers getting a new alternate uniform was first reported by Niners Nation last Thursday. It is expected this uniform would replace the black alternate they’ve been wearing the last few seasons (yay).

Guido didn’t give many clues there but “throwback nature of the jersey” is an interesting nugget; now if I were to describe something that way it would be to suggest that it’s more of a “fauxback”, but I’m not sure the non-uniform obsessive segment of our society would… so I’m leaning more toward it simply meaning it’s just an old design the team used to wear.

The 49ers haven’t done too much to their jersey design over the years, so if it’s a straight-up throwback the jersey will have to be red with white numbers, the variations from here would be sleeve striping and the numbers (drop shadow? serifs?).

There were no sleeve stripes on their home reds during their first several seasons, they added the familiar three white stripes in the 1950s and kept that way until 1995 when a uniform redesign placed more emphasis on black including the addition of the team logo to the sleeve. The black was dropped from the primary set in 2009 and the team has used only two stripes on each sleeve since the switch to Nike in 2012.

The team could get creative with their pant choice, the 49ers have used gold, white, and silver pants throughout their history with many different striping variations. I doubt we’ll see silver pants as the club will be forced to continue wearing gold helmets for the throwback, but we could see white; for those who do not remember, the team wore white pants exclusively for three seasons in the mid-to-late 1990s.

I have no idea what they’ll wear, no inside information on this one, but I feel like we could see a throwback to the throwback; I’m referring to the alternate uniform from the NFL’s 75th anniversary season in 1994. Gold helmet, red jersey, white numbers with black shadow, three white stripes on each sleeve, and white pants; let’s no forget they wore that alternate uniform during the Super Bowl victory at Super Bowl XXIX.

The event gets underway Wednesday May 23, 2018 at 7pm Pacific Time, which is right around my bedtime here in the East (I have young kids, don’t judge… you’ll see one day!)