With more teams introducing alternate uniforms for 2019, is there still value in bucking the trend and remaining with a traditional look?
On Saturday, Michigan State officially released their new alternate uniforms for the 2019 season. The look, heavy on neon green, veers significantly from the traditional green and white that have graced Spartans players for more than a century. Inevitably the bulk of the responses castigated Michigan State for introducing such a significant change to their classic look.
After I wrote about this, I spent much of the rest of my Saturday thinking about just how tradition factors into how college football teams attire themselves. For certain schools, switching up their uniforms would be tantamount to blasphemy.
One immediately thinks of the crimson and white of Alabama, or perhaps the blue and white of Penn State, when coming up with a list of classic football uniforms. There is the maize and blue of Michigan, replete with winged helmets, and the cardinal and gold of the USC Trojans. It is hard to imagine Texas out of their burnt orange, or These looks are timeless, consistent from generation to generation, a comfortable old friend to come back to every season.
Given how this thought played on my mind all day yesterday, I figured this week’s Sunday Morning Quarterback would be a great opportunity for an introspective look at what tradition is really worth in college football and how looks we tend to think are timeless are really current iterations of looks that have subtly tweaked over time.
How traditional are those looks we consider a tradition?
In the vein of thinking about schools with timeless looks, another that comes to mind among the blueblood schools of college football is the scarlet and grey of Ohio State, buckeye stickers adorning the helmets of the players. Unlike some other powerhouses with seemingly locked-in sartorial choices, though, the Buckeyes have been willing to take some liberties with their look.
When a school does switch up their appearance, as Ohio State has with their alternate uniforms in recent seasons, it can create a bit of cognitive dissonance. In the case of the Buckeyes, their attempts to recreate modern versions of throwback apparel have helped to highlight the fact that tradition is rarely as permanent and locked in as we tend to assume as college football fans.
Even looking across the rivalry to the Wolverines, their winged helmet has taken on different stylizations as helmet shapes and materials have changed over the years. While we tend to think of it as an immutable part of college football, the end result has not always looked quite the same as we visualize it in the 21st century.
Or think about the Trojans logo on USC’s helmets. That logo only appeared for the first time in the 1972 season, with USC previously wearing their cardinal helmets either unadorned, with a diamond, or with player numbers affixed to the sides. And even that iconic logo hasn’t always remained since 1972, with the athletic department making a short-lived attempt to replace it with the school’s classic Tommy Trojan logo in the early 1990s. Colors have changed subtly over the years, both on the helmet itself and also with the facemask.
And even when a school opts to stick with its classic look, scandals involving the program can lead fans to ponder whether a rebranding might help change a culture that has gone toxic. This was the case at Penn State following the revelations about longtime defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky. After Joe Paterno left the program and the school struggled to rebuild its credibility in the court of public opinion, a portion of the fan base was open to the idea of switching things up and putting the past behind them completely.
Ultimately, tradition is a powerful part of college football. Tradition, though, is only as real as we choose to believe, and when you dig deeper you can find that even the most iconic uniforms have been tweaked over time.
When change in uniforms becomes a tradition in itself
A willingness to innovate and switch up one’s look can also be a form of tradition. As someone who has devoted plenty of time to following Oregon football and learning its history, the Ducks have made a tradition out of consistently changing their look from season to season and even from game to game.
For a school like Oregon, whose college football history has consisted of long stretches of mediocrity bookended by moments of brilliance, finding a way to distinguish themselves from the rest of the pack was a critical part to their growth from Pac-10 afterthought to national powerhouse. After forging a deeper partnership with UO alumnus Phil Knight and Nike in 1996, the Ducks started switching things up as a way to make themselves stand out to recruits.
The result has been a cornucopia of uniform options, with the school switching from the Donald Duck branding that had been a staple since Walt Disney gave the school permission to use the character in 1947 to their stylized O and the sleeker Fighting Duck logo. In a given season, the Ducks could don dozens of different uniform combinations from a variety of helmets, jerseys, pants, and accessories.
Some of the efforts have been sublime, while others have been questionable. At times the Ducks have elected to completely forgo their classic green and yellow for all-black outfits, chrome efforts, and other one-off looks.
It is a trend that has spread throughout the sport since Oregon embraced change at the onset of the 21st century, as other schools have followed the lead coming out of Eugene. Other Nike schools as well as those attired by other brands have looked to the Ducks for inspiration on trends that are rising in the sport.
In that regard, Oregon has helped set a tradition that is bigger than its own program. The trend toward constant year-over-year rebranding through new uniforms has become a large part of the college football offseason.
Final thoughts about uniforms and tradition
What seems most logical to take away from the notion that uniforms are a tradition drifting toward permanence is that even those programs who are seemingly “traditional” in appearance have a history of switching things up as well.
No tradition, even ones that have been there for fans for decades, is every completely safe. As we’ve seen in the past with teams like Ohio State and USC, things can be and are changed over time for a variety of reasons. That in no way invalidates the fundaments of the tradition as it exists for a program and its fans.
The opposite is also true. When programs embrace change as a fundamental part of their identity, as Oregon has for more than two decades, that too can become a tradition unto itself.
In every case, tradition is valuable only so much as it keeps things progressing forward. The allure of wearing a winged helmet, or the classic two-tone U on Miami’s helmets, or any number of other traditional togs and logos doesn’t draw the recruits for programs that lack upper-crust status in the sport. A school that embraces innovation in its appearance is merely looking to find a different way to appeal to the players who can change a program’s fortunes.
Tradition, then, is only as powerful as we supporters of the sport allow them to be. And for all the uproar a new alternate can dredge up, a traditional look is traditional because it is an old standby a school can always return to if they so desire.