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Should the Rams switch their uniform colors or design when they come back to L.A.?

Football fans cheer for the return of the Rams to Los Angeles on the site of the old Hollywood Park horse-racing track in Inglewood on Tuesday, Jan. 12, 2016. Should switching venues be an opportunity to switch up the uniforms? Some fans say: "Don't mess with the horns."

Football fans cheer for the return of the Rams to Los Angeles on the site of the old Hollywood Park horse-racing track in Inglewood on Tuesday, Jan. 12, 2016. Should switching venues be an opportunity to switch up the uniforms? Some fans say: “Don’t mess with the horns.”

(Damian Dovarganes / AP)
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Now that the NFL’s St. Louis Rams are a lock to become the Los Angeles Rams once again, can we do something about those uniforms?

After all, the upcoming change of venue seems like the perfect time to switch things up. Or maybe having a professional football team that shares its color palette with an Ikea storefront is wholly appropriate for a self-assembled city.

Before moving forward, let’s take a look back at where the Rams came from, what other colors they’ve worn and how they got that arietine name.

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According to the team’s official website, the franchise was founded in Cleveland in 1937, with the original colors of red and black and a name the club owner borrowed from the Fordham University mascot.

By the following year, the colors had changed to blue and yellow (“the reason for the change is up for debate,” notes the website) with blue being the predominant color and yellow serving as the accent.

The team moved to Los Angeles (for the first time) for the 1946 season, and in 1948, the signature curling horns were added to the helmets, making them, the site notes, “the first professional football franchise to put a logo on the helmet.”

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The Rams went through a blue-and-white period in the mid-’60s and early ’70s (probably an indelible combination for anyone who remembers the “Fearsome Foursome”), and by 1979, the uniforms went to a palette of blue, yellow and white, a combination that exists today (except for swapping out the yellow for gold in 2000).

In the few hours since we floated the question over social media, the majority of responses have favored some combination of blue and yellow, though a few have made the case for going with the short-lived but clearly beloved blue-and-white uniforms (“midnight blue and cocaine white” read one Facebook post). One commenter even lobbied for going in a completely different direction, suggesting “palm tree green and citrus orange.”

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Too bold? Not by half, in our estimation, especially when you take into consideration the design of the official flag of the city of Los Angeles, designed in 1931 and called, at the time, the “Fiesta Flag.” It consists of the city seal against a background of three vertical zigzags; green to represent olive trees, yellow-gold to symbolize orange groves and red to represent vineyards. (Come on, who wouldn’t want to go to a tailgate party rocking that color combination?)

One thing no one has suggested — at least so far — is putting the Rams name out to pasture in favor of a more L.A.-appropriate moniker: the “Agents,” perhaps, or the “P-22s” (a nod to Griffith Park’s famous mountain lion), though renaming the team the “Los Angeles Stallions” could work on a couple of levels because that was both the name of a fictitious football team in the movie “The Last Boy Scout” and the name of a proposed St. Louis NFL franchise back in the 1990s.

Maybe there are some things that just aren’t worth butting heads over. Or, as the above commenter might have put it best: “Don’t mess with the horns.”

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