Ted Cunningham

There's something very mid-90s about it that really hits me in the nostalgia. I don't even know how to describe it, exactly. But the angled logos, the scripts all over everything, it looks almost like NBC's football graphics from the mid 90s.

I wouldn't go quite so far as to say these are dumb. I like them despite the issues. But I absolutely agree with the second part. The helmet and pants stripes are very much "Well the template can do this. If you want it closer to the original, it will have to be custom. OK, the template version is good enough."

Yeah, there's something off-balance about that Titans example: It's bottom-heavy. But I don't think that idea of imbalance applies, necessarily, to Baltimore. Even though the helmet, jersey, and pants are different colors and none of them are white, it still reads like a proper home/color uniform, because the pants are the lightest color of those three elements. So the uniform still looks "balanced" to me. That same perception of balance is why I don't like it, aesthetically, when a team wears a lighter color jersey over darker pants. (For example, WVU once played Kansas State while wearing navy helmets, gold jerseys, and navy pants. It looked very awkward to me.) Even though the jersey is a color other than white, it reads like an away uniform.

Visual aid:

Yeah, that's just a pretty good looking football game, generally.

I think it depends on how it's shared. x.com seems to be somewhat of a veneer/parked URL overlaying twitter.com's extensive infrastructure. It's just for show. As soon as you click on an x.com link, it redirects to a twitter.com link. As others have pointed out, if a user were to just change the "x" to "twitter", it seems to work fine. Yet another half-step/ill-advised degradation to Twitter's platform.

Kind of along these lines? I tried to stick with generally what TB used when they were orange and red (which fits pretty well with what the Broncos' orange jerseys look like), but with these colors, it ends up looking like one of Syracuse's many recent new uniforms.

But why do the helmet and pants stripes not match?

This is a great analogy. I remember Southwest buying AirTran, in large part, because it gave them Atlanta. But Southwest only flies 737s, so all of AirTran's 717s were sold off. I'm not saying Rutgers is the AirTran of D-1A college football, but the B1G brought them in for New York.

Each situation is unique, but I'm sure the same was said for Texas/Texas A&M, WVU/Pitt, etc., at least unofficially. Edit: That is to say, I would be surprised if they spent a nonconference game on maintaining a former conference rivalry (even if it's THE rivalry for the given school) when there has been very little precedent for that in the modern realignment era (2010ish to present).

Also, as a side note: Elon Musk has messed up Twitter so bad now that the tweets of individual accounts no longer appear in chronological order? (Presumably it's "algorithm"-based?) I was trying to see if there were any still photos I could post of what I was talking about re: the Citadel's uniforms, but all I can find when clicking on their Twitter profile is tweets from 2018?? That guy is so dumb; it's shocking.

Pretty close to solid, but the stripes on the white pants and white away uniforms are just powder/columbia - white - powder/columbia and the stripes on the white helmet are navy - powder/columbia - navy. Like.. why mismatch them?

Those are pretty clearly different sets of numbers, though. (I'm not trying to be a jerk, but I do think the discussion is more nuanced than that. It has a lot to do with money, how it's spent on various sports at these schools, and how that does or doesn't mix with tradition moreso than strictly being related to tradition.)

I've seen several different names for the set of numbers the Oilers used in 1960, including "Athletic Gothic" and "NCAA Gothic". I don't know that there was one standardized set of numbers like that back in the 60s, or if each manufacturer had its own iteration. But it was a fairly popular number set (behind various block fonts, of course). A few of the Continental Football League franchises used them, The Washington Huskies used them, Vermont and Columbia used them, and they were littered across high school football uniforms throughout the 60s and 70s. I have a couple iterations of them that I use for concepts and such. The first, I think I got from someone posting it here, waaay back in the day. The second is from the Nike catalog: The first iteration seems to be at least somewhat closer to what the Oilers wore in 1960. The weight was lighter and the curves felt a bit more humanist (akin to fonts like Gill Sans and Johnston, as opposed to more geometric-looking sans fonts like Futura or Century Schoolbook). The second, like I said, is from the Nike catalog. I am not sure if it's their propriety version or if it's a direct copy of something that preexisted this option. While not geometric by any means, it is just a bit squarer and a little more vertically proportioned. The 2009 Titans throwbacks, while still mostly looking like the top, tended a bit more toward the bottom version than the 1960 or 1994 versions. The Oilers used this set of numbers for one year, in 1960: Then, for the 1994 75th anniversary throwbacks, the numbers seemed to take on more of a 2:1 or 1:2 ratio instead of a 1:1 ratio. What I mean by that is, with 5 for example, instead of the number being roughly evenly divided between the top half and the bottom (bowl, or in old style figures, descender), the top half is roughly half the height of the bottom half. An exaggerated example: Stretching of the numbers on the various cuts of players' jerseys likely had an impact on the proportions as well. (See the 0s below between 90 and 50.) Another fun fact about the 1994 throwbacks is that the 2s did seem to have different upper terminals (mentioned previously in this thread in relation to the numbers not being Futura). The 94 2s apparently had horizontal upper terminals more akin to Helvetica. (A still photo of a player wearing a 2 from this game would be nice. These images are screenshots of the game from YouTube. It used to be one could find a few photos of these uniforms online, but they seemed to have disappeared into Google's new search algorithm.) This was a break from what they wore in 1960 (as evidenced by the photo of Billy Cannon, no. 20, above). Then lastly for the Titans/Oilers, are the 2009 AFL 50th anniversary uniforms. The numbers on these skew slightly more toward the Nike version. Certainly more vertical, but not quite as rigid as Nike's version. Another fun fact: the away uniforms appear to be wrong. The away uniforms in 1960 featured red numbers on the road. The 2009 throwbacks had blue numbers with red outlines/strokes. Like I said earlier, this set of numbers crops up in a lot of other places as well. Here's a uniform catalog (originally posted on Uni-Watch) that shows this set of numbers as an option. And speaking of another UW, Washington used these numbers on their throwback back in 2007. Because this was a Nike uniform, it's likely that this uniform featured a set of numbers much closer to the ones from the Nike catalog, posted above. I don't say that they're exactly the same, however, because the 0 is more of a rectangle with rounded corners than an oval. I think this set of numbers is neat, both for its general design and its variations. Hence this dissertation. Haha.

I saw the Bucs play the Brewers on Saturday, and among the myriad black and gold jerseys, I saw a nice Expos Vladimir Guerrero throwback. No idea what the connection was, if any, but it was there.

The common explanation for this is that a generation of Yinzers moved away during the late 80s when steel was dying off. Now there are enclaves of Steelers fans all over the country because of this emigration. I feel like sports broadcasters talk about how well the Steelers' fans travel, and while there is some truth to that, really it's more that there are just expat Pittsburghers and first-generation diaspora in a lot of other parts of the country.

While I don't think they're 100% linked to each other or that there's even a direct link between the two, when I see factory pomo in the context of sports, I think of its coinciding with an era of "just because we can doesn't mean we should". I feel like, especially toward the latter half of the 90s, a lot of designs became a lot more intricate and/or well outside the norm because of the rapid advance of computers and technology during that time, and the proliferation of software that came prepackaged with various clipart and other resources, many of which heavily leaned on factory pomo aesthetics. Again, I don't think there's a provable link between the two, and I'm not suggesting that the proposed Clippers logo was designed in PowerPoint 97. But the fairly rapid pace of change to uniforms starting in that era and factor pomo being prevalent at the time are inextricably linked in my head.

While I'm not the biggest fan of chrome helmets, generally, it has been WKU's primary look for 10+ years, and I think just out of being used to it, it doesn't bother me. (How do you like that for a clause-filled, run-on sentence? Haha.) I would prefer the red and white iteration of Ohio University that they used to be. But I also don't hate the chrome, and the rest of these uniforms are pretty nice. So all-in-all I'd say it's an improvement.

I've often thought the same: this would be a great set to build from. My biggest thing with these is just making sure the purple is very obviously purple. The lighting during that game made it look very blue, and the plain gold helmets obviously made this look like Notre Dame quite a bit. But yes, agreed: add some distinguishing touches here and there, and this would be a nice look for Washington.

That's the first thing I thought of too: The stripes sure look like Colorado's.

Backpedaling for just a second to the orange pants-specific part of the discussion: If they were to do orange pants with the away jersey, I feel like for balance, this is what they'd have to do: As others have pointed out, both the red numbers and the orange socks with orange pants look are both a bit heavy feeling.

I think I said this in the 2022 college thread at one point, but two major things throw me off about this helmet: The non-shell vent cutouts look AWFUL on any helmet that isn't black (or maybe navy). They aren't holes in the shell; there's plastic in them! Why can't that plastic be colored the same as the shell? (Hint: It's got to be because Riddell is first a company trying to sell its product, and those vents are distinctive. Anything to make them stand out arguably helps their brand.) The top bar(s) of the facemask being missing looks weird. Facemasks have had those since well before I was born, so I'm used to seeing them there. All of the sudden, there isn't one on this model. And that looks weird. Not to mention that, combined with the shape of the visor itself, makes this look like a motorcycle helmet. A subpoint to this is also that the facemask fastens on the sides behind (or inside?) the shell instead of on top. When I first saw these, I thought "Well, it will kind of be like 50s/60s helmets where the facemask only connected on the sides and didn't go around the top." But even then, the facemask fastened on the outside of the helmet. So there was simply more facemask to see. As a result, there was more contrast between shell and facemask. Now, the facemask is reduced to almost being an extension of the visor, in some ways, at least from a shape and real estate standpoint. A second subpoint about the facemask: black on black helmets, like the Steelers, look way less weird, especially from far away because it's harder to see the details, especially at any distance. However, lighter combinations (especially with dark visors like Elliot's) or higher-contrast combinations (especially if the facemask is darker than the shell) look weird, or at least very different than what I'm used to. Summing up point no. 2 as a tl;dr: With the Axiom, the facemask is part of the helmet instead of being something that is affixed onto the helmet, and it's jarring to see a football helmet that departs from what has been a fairly linear evolution of helmet styles. (Not to mention it looks more like a motorcycle helmet now.)

Kenny Pickett was wearing it last year.

Haha, bummer that we couldn't get the Eagle Eagles. @colinturner95 This is a great series; thanks for posting.

Were there copyright/trademark issues with using the previous logos? Or was everything changed to "refresh" them? I honestly can't remember if that question was asked/answered.