Ted Cunningham

14 minutes ago, simtek34 said:

 

Well, there was the 1978 Preseason...

 

 

I actually really like it. The GUD art makes it look a bit off due to the slightly different shade of Green, but the actual photo from 1978 makes it look much better.

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.

1 hour ago, tBBP said:

These East Carolina throwback sets are SHARP.  The announcers mentioned a senior student at ECU designed them, Will Somebody. 

 

Meanwhile Memphis out there looking like the Memphinnati Jungle Kats... 

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 hours ago, MrAstrodome said:

It's not bad, it just not them. Even with navy shells they look like the Bears.

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.

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.

12 hours ago, BBTV said:

I totally understand why this may not be popular with Bills fans based on the team's history and their memories, but in a vacuum I think this looks pretty sharp.  Maybe a larger logo and a Giants-ish finish rather than flat.

 

 

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.)

6 hours ago, Webfooter said:

So what are we exactly looking at besides there being red light coming from inside the stadium?

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.)

3 hours ago, spartacat_12 said:

Syracuse has unveiled beautiful new third jerseys:

Cheese.

(In Russian.)

8 hours ago, MJWalker45 said:

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.

17 hours ago, SSmith48 said:

Ok, I'm not usually a big fan of over-dramatic/produced/themed reveal videos/photos for a weekly uniform unveiling, but Duke football showcasing Cameron Indoor Stadium is actually kinda cool.

 

I don't like the plain white helmet though. Really needs the stripe back.

 

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.

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.

22 hours ago, Cujo said:

 

We all do.

 

Man, that right there is some 500% oversaturated Upper Deck football card goodness there.

7 hours ago, Bathysphere said:

 

One is a classic, while the other is “inconsistent.”

 

The Houston Oilers have done immeasurable damage to how we assess striping schemes.

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.)

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.

15 hours ago, Discrim said:

I recall FAMU doing this in either the late 90s or early 2000s.  No idea why they did it like that.

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.

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.)

Yeah, I'm right there with you. Those are some nice one-off uniforms.

6 hours ago, WSU151 said:

 

Doesn't Marshall use the Machine font in green and black too?  nevermind I think the Herd moved away from Machine in 2022...but they, too, use green numbers and the white/black double outline. 

 

It's a nice look for North Texas...just seemed a bit familiar. 

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.

Very nice work. Every transition feels very era- and trend-appropriate.

For sake of visual aid, because no one had posted yet (via UNISWAG):

8 hours ago, jerrylawless3 said:

New "Country Roads" alternates for West Virginia – to debut September 1st at Pittsburgh.

 

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.

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.

9 hours ago, NicDB said:

 

I'm actually agreeing with you. MIL also plays into some nicknames for the city ("The Mil," "Mil Town," etc.) and feels like the more "local" abbreviation to me.... if that makes any sense. There's just no denying that MKE has become the preferred abbreviation over the past couple decades. Even the Milwaukee Wave and The Hop (streetcar) use MKE.

This is such an interesting discussion to me. IATA codes seem (at least from anecdotal evidence) to be how many people abbreviate the names of entire cities/MSAs because they represent the point of entry and the shorthand by which some travelers identify their destination. Pittsburgh, for instance, is decidedly in the IATA =/= city abbreviation camp (as opposed to, apparently, Charlotte? according to the previous discussion). I've seen and heard it corrected many times: PIT is the airport. PGH is the city. (And Pitt is the university; some people have used that shorthand before too and have been corrected.)

Sports teams add an interesting layer to it because of how media abbreviates the cities or placenames. Pittsburgh sports are almost unequivocally "PIT" in scorebugs, box scores, etc. where that abbreviation convention is used. So if the Pirates were to incorporate an abbreviation into their future City Connect plans, I wouldn't necessarily be surprised to see them use PIT, even though PGH would be the more-accepted abbreviation for local fans. And while, ha ha yes the Pirates are awful and how would they even have fans outside of the city limits, let alone inside (haha), would it be a better move from a marketing standpoint to use PIT since that's how out-of-market fans who didn't necessarily grow up in or spend significant time in/around the city identify the city in which the Pirates play?

(To be clear, I'm firmly in the camp of PGH and/or using the generally accepted civil abbreviation instead of IATA codes. IATA codes were set up for a specific purpose. There are reasons why none of them start with N or why the letters don't line up with the city's name because of multiple airports in the area, etc. I certainly understand that in certain places they line up, one-to-one, or else the IATA code has come to be the city's abbreviation because there wasn't another abbreviation in common use previously or whatever. But those are exceptions. An IATA code is not designed to be an abbreviation for the city.)

On 5/18/2022 at 9:02 AM, Hawkeye15 said:

My proposal is for college football to move to megaconferences. Each Power 5 conference would absorb the Group of 5 teams to yield these conferences:

 

SEC: 28 teams

ACC: 28 teams

Big Ten: 26 teams

Big 12: 24 teams

Pac-12: 24 teams

 

Now there’s no glass ceiling on team in FBS. Every team, from Akron to Alabama, has a similar road map to the college football playoff. The only question left is scheduling. How do you schedule a 28-team conference? Algorithmic matching!

 

Here’s a template for what each individual teams’ schedule would look like:

Weeks 1 and 13 are prescheduled non-conference games. Weeks 2 and 3 are prescheduled conference games against randomly selected opponents, subject to playing one team from the top half of the previous year’s conference standings and one team from the bottom half.

 

Weeks 4 through 12 algorithmically match opponents every week, subject to prescheduled home/away designations throughout the year. Each team has one bye during this period and one prescheduled game against a rival.

 

The algorithm is quite simple. Line up each of the teams according to home and away designations and order them by conference standings. Match the top team set to play at home to the top team set to play on the road (if they have not already been scheduled to play each other), then go to the next team in the standings and proceed until all opponents have been matched. A poor team gets a fortunate schedule early on and wins some games? They will soon be scheduled with the giants. A great team loses a pair of close games right away? They will soon be scheduled with the minnows and elevated back up.

 

To avoid shenanigans, you would only sort the conference standings by conference record and then randomly order the teams with the same record. This also means there could be weekly scheduling shows to reveal the (quasi-) random matchups that were created.

 

Week 14 algorithmically matches opponents as well, but with no home/away designations set beforehand. This ensures that if a conference has 2 giants that have somehow avoided each other to the end, they will meet in the last week. Home and away would be decided post-matching by scheduling in the location opposite those teams’ last meeting. And if a matchup is a conference decider, the conference could turn it into a neutral site conference championship game.

 

I simulated the 2022-23 college football season and at the very end will reveal the resulting conference standings, the eight-team (!) playoff, and the national champion.

 

But first, onto the conferences where I have designed new uniform sets for every team under the constraint that a casual fan be able to notice that the uniform is different than it was before. Onto the SEC!

Two things: 1) The uniforms (so far) have been well thought out and have kept things simple. Nice work all around. 2) I love the ideas regarding scheduling and the conferences. While I realize there are guidelines in place for not going too far away from aesthetics-based concepts in this forum, I'd love to hear/see an explainer on how you did all the scheduling and simulation work.

This is very cool.

It's a nice looking uniform for sure. (Of the red-helmet Falcons looks, I actually prefer this early version with the black jerseys compared to the all red 70s/80s iteration.) But being unintentionally forced into looking like the 90s Falcons because of the one helmet rule was an unexpected boon. I grew up in the 90s and I think that was the height of my NFL fandom, so of course that look resonates with me. And while what we've had for the past few years isn't a true 90s throwback, there's just something about the classic Falcon in black on black over a black jersey and white pants. Again, because of my own bias, I think the Falcons should be a black-forward team instead of red-forward.

Either way, I do like the red helmet too. So I'm not going to complain about that look or the aesthetics-based potential for the game against SF in October.

The latest one gets it even closer; it's definitely a Tigers-esque D. The previous iteration looked like a D too, but more along the lines of Duquesne's latest rebrand.

I really appreciate you posting all these process images. It gives an excellent insight into your design process and why the final products come out the way they do. Nice work.