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Ranking the 10 best helmets in college football

By Connor Muldowney

Nov 26, 2022; Los Angeles, California, USA; A general overall view of helmets at the line of scrimmage as Notre Dame Fighting Irish offensive lineman Zeke Correll (52) snaps the ball against the Southern California Trojans in the second half at United Airlines Field at Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Mandatory Credit: Kirby Lee-USA TODAY Sports
Nov 26, 2022; Los Angeles, California, USA; A general overall view of helmets at the line of scrimmage as Notre Dame Fighting Irish offensive lineman Zeke Correll (52) snaps the ball against the Southern California Trojans in the second half at United Airlines Field at Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Mandatory Credit: Kirby Lee-USA TODAY Sports /
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College football has some really great helmets. The sport has a number of historic programs with helmets that haven’t changed over the years, but I’m not going to sit here and pretend that all of those “iconic” helmets are great. Some are, but most aren’t.

Penn State is the perfect example. It’s not a bad helmet, by any means, but a recent helmet ranking by 247Sports that ranked Penn State’s No. 2 behind Ohio State. That, to me, is just insane. It’s just a white helmet with a blue stripe, let’s stop over-hyping it.

The list above was the inspiration for my ranking of the top 10 helmets in college football. Let’s start with a list of honorable mentions.

Honorable Mention

This happened to be a bigger section than I had expected because I thought most of these teams would make the top 10 before I really sat down to narrow things down.

  • UCLA
  • Pitt (script helmet)
  • Alabama
  • Florida
  • Texas
  • Michigan State
  • Clemson
  • North Carolina
  • Tennessee

I could easily put each one of these helmets on the list and I think all of them deserve to be in the conversation. So let’s go through them all and why they’re here.

UCLA’s script logo on a gold background is severely underrated. The script Pitt helmets are beautiful, don’t kid yourself. Alabama’s may be somewhat plain, but it’s one of those helmets that doesn’t need to do much to be noticed as great. I’ve always loved the orange Florida helmets with the script “gators” on the side — even the blue one is nice. Burnt orange looks so good on anything which is why Texas is here and that Longhorn logo is simple but fantastic. Michigan State has the best green helmets in the game with the white Spartan logo — even the white alternates are great. I am partial to orange so Clemson’s helmets stand out to me. And lastly, North Carolina’s blue is iconic and those helmets deserve more love. And Tennessee is just, well, clean.

Now that we’ve gotten the honorable mentions out of the way, let’s take a look at the rest of the top 10.

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