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Ted Cunningham

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Everything posted by Ted Cunningham

  1. I still feel like that translates as black, even though, after looking at it for a minute, it's obviously not black. But it really took me a few seconds to even register that the color had changed. Essentially, I don't think it makes a difference if that color is dark grey or black; it doesn't change the over all look of the uniform. It's an additional non-blue dark color added to a color combination that, some years earlier, had only been Honolulu blue, silver, and white. It's a lateral move within the context of that uniform (and the iteration that came before it).
  2. Two good points there: It really is hard to see the logo for what it is on a black background with no keyline. While that might be "cool" or trendy to treat it the way they did (kind of in a Boise State/Western Michigan/other oversized logo treatments in one color kind of way), it just looks like some blue splashed on a black background. And then yes, the stripes don't work either because of the way they look on the uniforms: The shoulder stripes are silver-blue-silver, and the helmet, when viewed from the front, looks to have roughly the same width on the stripes, but it's blue-black (essentially, by merit of there being no stripe in the middle)-blue. So it doesn't fit. I think, in theory, a black helmet could work for the Panthers, but it would have to follow the same design choices as their black jerseys.
  3. YEP. The only thing that doesn't make sense is keeping a form of the wordmark from the old/60s set.
  4. I'm there with you. While I would still advocate for a combination of the 60s and 80s looks (or really their current green helmet with the 80s/90s logo on the 60s-style striped-up uniforms), the current uniform is not bad, per se when none of the elements are black and there's contrast between the elements. (Yes, that's a lot of caveats, but this is my long-winded way of agreeing with you: they aren't terrible uniforms when worn properly.)
  5. I don't know if it's an unpopular opinion or what (given opinions about sleeve stripes on modern templates, etc.), but this is the solution I'd advocate for.
  6. Yeah, these are really nice uniforms. Your comment reminded me that they were wearing them tonight, so I just tuned in. (Happy surprise that it's a close game, too.) The archetypal ECU uniform, for me at least, has a purple helmet. One of my earliest non-WVU/non-Big East college football memories was an ECU/NC State game from the early-ish 90s. And I liked the Vikings because they wore purple, so I took a passing interest in ECU then too. Those uniforms are similar to the ones they're wearing tonight, so they resonate with me on multiple levels. As for Memphis, I feel like they do this a lot with the colors they choose to use: Sometimes they completely eschew blue. There was a bowl game a few years ago where Memphis wore grey and white. This time, it's black and white. I'm not sure what the thinking is, unless they just like keeping their various uniform designs to a single color and white? Haha. Here's what tonight's game looks like, for context. (There is a dearth of photos for this game. Memphis has black pants, since this is best shot I could find of their uniforms, in-game.):
  7. This is where I am too. "In a vacuum", these look decent. (Classic striping. Outside of the the inconsistencies with white socks, there's decent contrast between the jerseys, pants, and socks. etc.) But we don't operate in a vacuum, so it's just kind of awkward looking. Definitely not what you come to expect with the Bears. I think it's indeed the lack of the navy helmet. Like @MrAstrodome said, orange jerseys with the navy helmets still reads "Bears". This does not.
  8. I really hate Ole Miss in white helmets. I don't know why, but I do. It's somehow even more incomplete (for lack of a better word) than when they decided to switch to plain white pants. Variety is fine. And frankly, I think all three of their primary jerseys work: navy, red, and powder. (It's kind of cool that they can just swap out the base color, leave all the other elements white, and the jersey remains recognizable as an Ole Miss jersey.) But in order for that to really work in sum, it needs the grey pants and the navy or powder helmet. The white/powder/white really just looks like a catalog example or something.
  9. Yeah, it's not a bad look, certainly. Of the three "potential colors" (or team colors, I guess) that the Bills could ostensibly use for their helmet, I'd say blue is the last of those three options only because both red and white provide better contrast with the body of the buffalo being blue. (And that's not even a hard and fast rule, necessarily. My favorite Falcons helmet is the 1990 - 2002 black-on-black helmet.)
  10. I believe it's the red light coming from inside the stadium. (I took it to mean they're working on some kind of promotion that more prominently features red.)
  11. What really gets me about these helmets is how massive the cuts in them are and how that results in this weird two-tone (helmet color/black) effect. It almost all applications, this looks really weird with the logo decals. I understand that the cuts are there ostensibly for player safety and impact reduction. I'm cool with that. But I'm also certain the way Riddell does these is a marketing thing. What they could do is make the material below the outer shell the same color as the shell. Then those cuts become way less noticeable. Instead, it's black. I'm guessing they would never do that by default because the specific shapes the cuts make are almost a logo or other such mark for Riddell. Those watching can identify the helmet brand even at distance because of its shape. While we've seen more variations in helmet shapes over the years, this one is particularly abrupt in its differences. It's interesting to me how alien these look simply because the part of the facemask that goes around the top of the front of the helmet is missing.
  12. This also makes a lot of sense within the context of this season, specifically: Duke is 3-0 and they're playing Kansas today, who is also 3-0. So it's undefeated Duke vs. undefeated Kansas in football. It's a fun tie-in/idea.
  13. Yeah, this is a really tough match up, color-wise, because it's normally so navy-heavy (with Denver being the away team). If Seattle wears its home uniforms, it's navy vs. white trimmed in navy. The green (obviously) breaks that up, but the all-green is too much. I like the below better, though I don't think anything like that would ever happen. Not to mention these white pants don't actually exist with the green in the stripe, haha. Over time, I've become less concerned about how traditional or modern the elements of a particular uniform are. I do, however, far prefer contrast between jerseys and pants (and pants and socks). A modern uniform can still look good as long as there's enough contrast between elements. (The exception to that "rule" is white uniforms: white over white can't be helped in some cases.) As a sub-rule to that rule, I don't care for "bottom-heavy" home/color uniforms. So taking the Seahawks as an example, I wouldn't really like green jerseys over navy pants either. It still looks somewhat like an away uniform and awkward/unbalanced.
  14. Man, that right there is some 500% oversaturated Upper Deck football card goodness there.
  15. The Vikings are the classic in this example, right? In all seriousness, the Vikings look shown here is at least as cohesive as that iteration of the Bears, if not more. Setting up some loose parameters, you have four elements: helmet, jersey (sleeves), pants, and socks. The Vikings have three distinct stripe patterns/treatments: helmets and socks have no stripes, and the sleeves and pants have distinct patterns. The Bears have four different stripe patterns/treatments: Nothing on the helmets, "away" stripes on the jerseys, Braisher-esque stripes on the pants, and "home" stripes on the socks. So that's four non-matching elements for the Bears, and three for the Vikings. Admittedly the above is a very loose/reductionist view of football uniform design. But just from looking at these two uniforms side by side, the Vikings feel more consistent given the color balance of the various striping and stripe-adjacent elements. Also, I hear what you're saying about the Oilers. Though I think they are a singular, or at least rare, exception. I have always hated the argument that the below stripe patterns are "the same": The helmet, sleeves, and pants all exhibit different striping patterns on top of three different background colors. (Essentially: helmet: Braisher, sleeve: Auburn-style Northwestern, and pants...is there a term for that style?) If you lifted those stripes off of that uniform, you'd have (from top to bottom) 1) three stripes that touch, 2) three stripes with a gap in between each, and 3) a pair of paired and mirrored stripes. I understand the argument the other way (that by putting orange on the outside, they're actually the same stripes, white bordered by blue bordered by orange repeated three times), but physical application of the elements to the uniform (either in actuality or at least in perception) makes it so that the color of the uniform article to which the stripes are applied doesn't count as a stripe in and of itself. In other words, there's no orange stripe on the helmet, there are no blue stripes on the jersey (it's just the jersey itself showing through between the orange and white stripes), and there is no white stripe on the pants; it's just the pants. However, the Oilers don't appear to have disparate striping elements in the same way (even though arguably the same principle applies) because they better conform to other striping consistencies, like matching the helmet and pants stripes and the jersey and sock stripes. The 1986 Oilers actually accomplished this best between both their home and away uniforms (individual stripe thickness notwithstanding). The away uniforms simply feature essentially the same stripes on all four elements (because everything was white anyway) and the home uniform features consistent striping between the helmets and pants and the jerseys and socks. The away, in particular, satisfies both camps. As ever, all of this is highly subjective. Others may not perceive stripes in the same physical-application way that I do, so the colors of the uniform may read as additional stripes. As such, I don't necessarily present the above as an argument, except that the Vikings look presented is more consistent than the Bears', (and to a degree, agreeing that calling that particular Bear's look "classic" just because it's old is something this board is generally prone to doing, or at least conferring more favorable opinions to old looks just because of their age). Most of this post is simply an explanation of how I understand stripes on football uniforms. (And I don't think I've every actually written that down before.)
  16. Wow, yep. There really were some good match ups in the preseason. Thanks for putting that together, @Bathysphere. I feel like a lesson that can be taken from that list above is contrast between elements is good. In that whole list/set of pictures, there were five uniforms where the pants and jerseys match, and all of them were white (which is acceptable or at least better than matching dark-colored pants/jerseys). Plus, there's only one instance of socks matching pants. And note, too, that not all of these are "classic" uniforms. There are several modern ones as well (Vikings, Chargers, Bengals, Bills, Jets, etc.). Use of color and contrasting elements make for an infinitely better uniform match up.
  17. Ah, neat. I didn't realize that either FAMU or Louisville had done this. The first (and to my knowledge up to now, only) instance I noticed it was the Ottawa Rough Riders back in the 60s. (I was bored once while working out and picked a random Grey Cup on YouTube to watch (1966). Ottawa was one of the teams, and that was the first time I'd ever seen forward-facing numbers like that.
  18. Yes, that Twitter thing is happening to me too. While not a huge deal, it does mess up scrolling slightly. (And given that's a lot of the actual user interaction, that's a bigger deal here than it would be on other sites.)
  19. Yeah, I'm right there with you. Those are some nice one-off uniforms.
  20. Yes, Marshall has used the offset black-stroked green (or white on green jerseys) numbers off and on (more on than off) since they were a 1-AA school in the early/mid-90s.
  21. Very nice work. Every transition feels very era- and trend-appropriate.
  22. For sake of visual aid, because no one had posted yet (via UNISWAG):
  23. Also, one other thing: these pictures were taken on the forest road leading to Coopers Rock State Forest. If ever you're driving through West Virginia (on I-68), take the 20 minutes out of your drive and check out Coopers Rock. There's an exit off the highway just for it, it's a short and easy drive to the overlook, and the overlook itself is spectacular.
  24. That WVU alternate is certainly not terrible. Given the alts they've had in the past (Pro Combat coal whatever--incidentally used in one of the last iterations of the Backyard Brawl wherein WVU beat Pitt to a pulp at Heinz Field, various iterations of the grey uniforms, etc.), this is pretty nice. As @Bathysphere mentioned, if they're going to do an all-white alternative, this is it. And I like the flying WV in the state outline. Like @WSU151 said, WVU's away look should be blue helmets, white jerseys, and gold pants, especially for the first iteration of the rivalry game in 11 years. But I like this as a once-per-season alt, generally speaking. Sidenote: my wife and I are going to go to that game in September, and I'm REALLY looking forward to it. My dad and I were WVU season ticket holders through 2018, and I haven't been able to go to a game since.
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