This is my fuddy-duddy uniform rant. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
2 1/4" stripes aren't great, but the almost-all-black sleeves are flat-out dreadful. Look, if you don't want your officials to wear stripes anymore, then just say so. Don't phase them out one stripe at a time. It's weird how nowadays your shoes can have as much white as you want and nobody cares, but they want your sleeves to get blacker and blacker every year.
And if we must ditch the stripes on a sleeve-by-sleeve basis, can we at least pick another color besides all-black? We're starting to look like a crew of ninjas.
I don't even get the point. High school is not college, college is not the NFL, mimicking the higher levels' clothing fools nobody, and 1" stripes look perfectly fine now that we don't rely on analog electron tubes to record video.
But fine, you want wider stripes for whatever reason, I can compromise. Let's do 2". 2 is plenty. NCAA officials look fine in them. I would say 2" is the maximum. Beyond 2" is the fine line between "stripes" and "thick rectangles side by side." And the other reason why NCAA officials look fine is because their stripes still go all the way around. No black sleeves, no black side panels (though sometimes due to tailoring they can have two black stripes adjoining).
