The Super Bowl is tomorrow and it’s here in Arizona. There’s so much hype and excitement in the city it’s hard to avoid. I’ve flown quite a bit in the past several months, and the airport shops in Phoenix Sky Harbor are loaded with Super Bowl merchandise. Although I was a little confused at first, I’m excited about the unconventional colors used in the logo. I mean really: red, turquoise, and blue?

Let’s try to figure out what they’re going for here. The red looks like “Sedona red” that dominates the Diamond Backs new uniforms that came out last season. Before they upgraded their uniforms, the Diamondbacks’ were covered with turquoise, copper, black and purple since the team started in 1995.

Teal and purple were vaguely fashionable in 1995, but I suspect that the primary reason they were chosen is because they’re Arizona colors. Really, when you think of it, it’s rare that a state in the US has loyalty to colors that doesn’t already stem from their big universities. It’s because Arizona is a geological freak show that makes for good postcards.

Arizona Dbacks Sedona Red Uniform
Exhibit A: The Arizona Dbacks Debuted Sedona Red last season.

Here’s a summary of our indigenous colors:

  1. Earth Tones because there’s a lot of earth here.
  2. Copper because you’ll find it in the earth.
  3. Turquoise because you’ll find it in the earth.
  4. Purple because it pairs well with turquoise and teal since the early 1990s. It’s an adopted color that the state loves like it’s own.
  5. Red because of the rock formations through the state, especially in Sedona and the Grand Canyon.
  6. Oranges because we grow a lot of citrus, and the sun is pretty bright here.

So I’m guessing that the designer of the Super Bowl logo picked from this list (#3 and #5) and then threw in the spots of blue to make merchandise easier to sell to NFL fans.