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The National Football League has a lot of rules. Most football fans know the experience of watching a game with someone who’s not familiar with the gridiron and realizing how truly complicated the game can be. What constitutes an unnecessary roughness penalty seemingly changes every week—to say nothing of the fact that “unnecessary roughness” could be the name of the sport itself. But even someone who can breathlessly explain the difference between defensive holding, illegal contact, and pass interference might not know all of the strict wardrobe rules that their favorite players have to follow between the lines.
A player found to be in violation of the NFL’s uniform policy—having the wrong color of socks, wearing any visible logos that aren’t approved by the league, tinting his face mask visor too dark, et cetera—is subject to a $5,797 fine. And that’s just for the first offense. Doing it again will run you $17,389, at which point you’d think most players would start abiding by the rule book.
That being said, there is still some wiggle room for players to have fun with their game-day attire, or at least put their own flavor on it. When he was slinging touchdowns in Green Bay, Aaron Rodgers made the turtleneck his signature look. For particularly chilly Buffalo nights, Josh Allen has been known to rock the kangaroo-style pocket. Who could forget former Packers’ wide receiver James Jones running routes while wearing a full hoodie underneath his jersey? The hoodie has since been banned—Rule 5, Section 4, Article 6, Item 1 of the official league handbook states: “Players may not wear undergarments with an exposed hood hanging outside the collar of the jersey”—but in 2025, a few creative souls have found a new way to spice things up: custom face masks.
Dion Dawkins, the gregarious left tackle for the Buffalo Bills, has the most audacious custom job in the league. Starting at the end of the 2024 season, Dawkins began wearing a mask with the bars twisted into a snowflake pattern, an homage to his nickname: The Shnowman.
Dawkins got the nickname as a child in New Jersey, where he would shovel his neighbors’ walkways to earn some pocket money. After the Bills took him in the second round of the 2017 draft, Dawkins’s profile steadily rose as he became both a stalwart of Buffalo’s offensive line, the personal blindside protector for Josh Allen, and a Pro Bowler in each of the past four seasons. Now, every time he takes his stance on the Bills’ offensive line, Dawkins does so in style, rocking the “Shnow” across his face. It’s an icy reminder to opponents that the 300 pounders in the trenches have some style, too.
“We’re not just big fat guys. We’re swagged up,” Dawkins tells me over the phone. “We’re just in a different position. We have to be bigger, but we can still be swaggy. I wear bright red cleats for a reason: I know I stand out. The face mask is just another way to stand out.”
The story of the Shnow mask began in the Bills’ locker room in 2024, when Dawkins says he was approached by someone at Riddell, an official helmet supplier of the NFL, at the Bills’ training facility. “They came over to me and they were like, ‘Dion, we’re thinking about doing a face mask [for you],’ he recalls. Dawkins wasn’t all that impressed by the sample—and said as much. “It just wasn't correct. So we sat down and then I was like, ‘How about, let's put a bar here, let's put the snowflake here, let's do this.’”
Getting the Shnow mask right wasn’t as simple as just slapping on a snowflake design, though. Dawkins had specific requests that were nonnegotiable—like being able to reach through the bars to touch his face—and Riddell had to worry about meeting all of the safety requirements put in place by the National Operating Committee on Standards for Athletic Equipment, or NOCSAE.
“Dion was somewhat unique with this because his request had some personalization, some cosmetic requests, but also some functionality requests that required some customization,” says Chris Kays, the vice president of product development at Riddell. “He was kind of a nice blend of being creative to get the look that he wants, but also we had to do some things to make it to where he could use [his helmet] the way he likes to.”
No one is more appreciative of this than Dawkins, who said the standard face mask he was given as a rookie was “ugly as hell” and didn’t add to the all-important swag quotient whatsoever. He credits Terrell Suggs, the longtime Ravens linebacker who tortured quarterbacks for a living across 17 NFL seasons, as the true pioneer of the custom face mask movement. Kays, however, says that isn’t quite accurate. The first player he recalls voicing his desire for a custom face mask was Connor Barwin, a defensive end who played from 2009 to 2018. Unlike Dawkins, Barwin actually sat down with a marker, drew out exactly what he wanted, and sent it to Riddell. “He sketched this out with our key account manager right beside him,” Kays says, adding that the resulting mask is now an inventoried item that Riddell keeps in stock. “Because he was on the Texans, I ended up calling this the TX.”
When I ask Kays about Suggs, he chuckles and informs me that the demonic pass rusher’s face mask was one that the NFL actually cracked down on. “It just had a ton of bars,” Kays explains. (While the rulebook doesn’t have a specific limit on the number of bars allowed, it does mention that the league office has final approval on all customizations.) Did Suggs explicitly request more bars on his face mask with the intention of inflicting as much damage as possible? Kays says he won’t speak for the future Hall of Famer, but did express a sentiment likely shared by anyone who was ever tackled by Suggs. “He’s a menacing dude, to begin with,” he says, “and that definitely didn’t soften him up, having that face mask and a blacked-out visor. He looked pretty scary.”
Kays is all too familiar with the NFL and their rules now, which he thinks were put in place because some of the players’ masks were simply too horrifying. “They considered some custom face masks overbuilt, and they kind of made it sound like it was because of a safety reason. But the reality of it is, it was getting to where they were looking more and more menacing on the field. So they used that as kind of like, Hey, you can't do that anymore.”
Unlike Suggs’s intimidation factor and Dawkins’s style flex, Washington Commanders quarterback Marcus Mariota uses his face mask to pay tribute to his home state. The 11-year veteran, former Heisman Trophy winner, and proud son of Hawaii has gotten into five games this year in a backup role. While his face mask is subtle, astute football fans may have noticed that it spells 808, the Hawaiian area code.
Mariota also worked closely with Riddell on his custom mask, which he’s used in some form since his college days at Oregon. Taylor Hanohano, a rep at Riddell, noticed that the quarterback setting college football on fire was wearing a Riddell helmet and reached out to the team’s equipment manager about creating something special. When that message was relayed to Mariota, he says he and his best friend immediately got to work.
“We were sitting down in our apartment, we’re coming up with some ideas, and we landed on the 808 mask as a way to pay homage to where we were from,” Mariota tells me. “We thought it was a cool way to subtly just shout out the Hawaiian Islands. It’s funny, we came up with a bunch of different ideas like lightning bolts and all sorts of stuff. But it came down to function as well: being able to see the defense and not something that was crazy and will block my vision.” Mariota is now 32 years old and playing for his fifth NFL team. Even though he’s on the East Coast now, he tries to spend about a month of every offseason in Hawaii, where his parents still live. Miami Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa, who is also from Hawaii, has been wearing the 808 grill as well, which Mariota describes as “pretty meaningful.”
As the NFL continues to police everything about a player’s uniform down to his shoelaces, the ability to play around with face masks remains one of the last remaining ways for stars like Dawkins to bring their aesthetic eye to the field. The big man in Buffalo describes his new look—especially when paired with the Bills’ exceptional Cold Front jerseys—like wearing the best tuxedo at a wedding. “From the brooch, to the jewelry, to the watch, to the laces, to the cufflinks, everything was just perfect.” While performance is forever and always the chief concern of NFL players, how they present themselves is a close second.
“You put your uniform on, you look in the mirror before you hit the field, and you know you look good,” Dawkins says. “If you’re going out there and you're like, ‘Man, I look kind of fat today,’ you're going to be insecure, upset, and you won’t play well.”