College Football 2020

[DCarp1231]

I thought Pitt’s alternate looked great yesterday. The natural sunlight helped a lot. That helmet is a thing of beauty in my eyes

[Tracy MidGrady]

Ole Miss should just drop navy 

[SSmith48]

46 minutes ago, DNAsports said:

I thought Pitt’s alternate looked great yesterday. The natural sunlight helped a lot. That helmet is a thing of beauty in my eyes

As far as gray alternates go, this one is actually very good! Fits the location, cool elements, fantastic helmet, and the yellow touches here and there are very nice and add a good pop of color.

[lahaye7]

did a very rudimentary stripe edit for Ole Miss, looks a little better I think.   

 

[MJWalker45]

26 minutes ago, lahaye7 said:

did a very rudimentary stripe edit for Ole Miss, looks a little better I think.   

 

The fact that they didn't have stripes took away from the pants. I wonder if they had ordered matching pants that didn't arrive and decided to go without stripes instead of wearing navy and red. I know Mississippi's thing is using one color and white, but they should have mixed in red or navy blue in the striping patterns so they can use these with the navy helmets as well. 

[CaliforniaGlowin]

3 hours ago, DNAsports said:

I thought Pitt’s alternate looked great yesterday. The natural sunlight helped a lot. That helmet is a thing of beauty in my eyes

Oh man that helmet's straight grimy!  I like it.

 

And 0/00 is my favorite jersey number.  Happy to see more of it.

[dont care]

5 hours ago, DNAsports said:

I thought Pitt’s alternate looked great yesterday. The natural sunlight helped a lot. That helmet is a thing of beauty in my eyes

Is the helmet suppose to look like they took a blow torch like that or did the paint get rubbed off during the game?

[WSU151]

4 minutes ago, dont care said:

Is the helmet suppose to look like they took a blow torch like that or did the paint get rubbed off during the game?

 

Pretty sure that's a pre-game picture. The helmet was supposed to look like that. 

[DCarp1231]

6 minutes ago, WSU151 said:

 

Pretty sure that's a pre-game picture. The helmet was supposed to look like that. 

Honestly, it’s probably in my Top 10 favorite alternate helmets.

[OHK]

Both Arkansas and A&M just looked "right" yesterday. Very basic designs for each, but that's what works for their uniforms:

 

 

[MJWalker45]

1 hour ago, OHK said:

 

The A&M numbers look half done without the interior serifs. They should've gone with standard block numbers or found a way to thin them down. 

[reb_fan_23]

Ole Miss fan here, and I have to agree with what others have said.  The powder blue jerseys with the white pants did not work.  Should have worn the gray pants.  Yes, the navy stripe on the gray pants would not have “matched” but that’s sort of the point.

 

IMO what makes the Ole Miss powder blue helmets so great is that powder blue is not necessarily a throwback color for us in the same sense that other schools have throwback colors (think Pitt with the royal blue or Oregon with the Kelly green).  Powder blue was never a school color for Ole Miss.  The football team just happened to order the wrong color helmet when they first switched from leather to plastic.  The team then intentionally wore a mismatched helmet for the next 20+ years, which included probably the program’s most steady success.  It’s a neat quirk that I think deserves to be honored by wearing the powder blue helmets a couple times per season.  Personally, I would leave it there, but the players have been clamoring for a powder blue jersey and they seemed to enjoy them.   

 

The original powder blues in action:

[tBBP]

1 hour ago, reb_fan_23 said:

Ole Miss fan here, and I have to agree with what others have said.  The powder blue jerseys with the white pants did not work.  Should have worn the gray pants.  Yes, the navy stripe on the gray pants would not have “matched” but that’s sort of the point.

 

IMO what makes the Ole Miss powder blue helmets so great is that powder blue is not necessarily a throwback color for us in the same sense that other schools have throwback colors (think Pitt with the royal blue or Oregon with the Kelly green).  Powder blue was never a school color for Ole Miss.  The football team just happened to order the wrong color helmet when they first switched from leather to plastic.  The team then intentionally wore a mismatched helmet for the next 20+ years, which included probably the program’s most steady success.  It’s a neat quirk that I think deserves to be honored by wearing the powder blue helmets a couple times per season.  Personally, I would leave it there, but the players have been clamoring for a powder blue jersey and they seemed to enjoy them.   

 

The original powder blues in action:

 

So Ole Miss' uniforms have been jacked up for that long???

 

Whatever...they're still weirdly one of my more favorite looks in CFB, for reasons unknown to mankind.

[Red Wolf]

49 minutes ago, Buc said:

 

So Ole Miss' uniforms have been jacked up for that long???

 

Whatever...they're still weirdly one of my more favorite looks in CFB, for reasons unknown to mankind.

 

A lot of us get obsessed with every uniform element being matchy-match, but it's not necessary. Sometimes things work that defy logic. Why is it that the old-school Rams uniforms work despite having white on the pants, but no white on the jersey or helmet? How can Ole Miss look its best with the light blue helmets, red jerseys (with no blue anywhere) and gray pants (the ones with a navy stripe)? Life is just mysterious.

[JTernup]

15 minutes ago, Red Wolf said:

 

A lot of us get obsessed with every uniform element being matchy-match, but it's not necessary. Sometimes things work that defy logic. Why is it that the old-school Rams uniforms work despite having white on the pants, but no white on the jersey or helmet? How can Ole Miss look its best with the light blue helmets, red jerseys (with no blue anywhere) and gray pants (the ones with a navy stripe)? Life is just mysterious.

Something good could still be improved. In life perfect can be the enemy of good, but in uniform design we shouldn't settle for good when perfect is attainable. I think the above mockup is just an objectively better and more cohesive uniform than what Ole Miss took the field in yesterday.

[Ted Cunningham]

6 hours ago, JTernup said:

Something good could still be improved. In life perfect can be the enemy of good, but in uniform design we shouldn't settle for good when perfect is attainable. I think the above mockup is just an objectively better and more cohesive uniform than what Ole Miss took the field in yesterday.

To preface: this isn't an attack directed at you, JTernup. It's simply a counterargument to the views you expressed here.

 

1) "In life, perfect can be the enemy of good, but in uniform design we shouldn't settle for good when perfect is attainable" This seems contradictory to me, unless you mean to extract uniform design from life generally. If perfect has the potential to work against good, then why would one work to attain perfect at the potential cost of good? (I'll come back to this in a moment.)

 

2) While the mock-up arguably presents better color balance between the three main uniform elements (which could make it a better uniform in your opinion [I don't think we can say "objectively better" simply because aesthetics rely so heavily on personal taste]), it also deviates from those elements that make Ole Miss look like Ole Miss. Adding another color between the white shoulder hoops is the big one there. Ole Miss football, generally, has had double white shoulder stripes on its color/home jerseys. Yes, there are examples of them with other stripes, but the most identifiable and most used look is the double white shoulder stripes (be that on navy, red, or even powder blue). As for the particular uniform yesterday, the white pants definitely changed the look, arguably, more drastically than the change in jersey color. But because the general idea behind the jersey remained the same, Ole Miss still looked like Ole Miss. 

 

I think this is interesting because it gets at a discussion we come back to on these boards from time to time: thinking of the appeal and attractiveness of an identity "in a vacuum" vs. in the context of the look in a team's history (be that context based on success in that uniform, longevity of the look, etc.). The former, "in a vacuum", is "perfect" as you've described above. Sure, a perfect look, applying all of the "generally accepted axioms of good uniform design" (which don't necessarily have to be explicit, but stuff like "color balance", mirrored elements between home and away uniforms, symmetry, etc.) could be attained for every team. However, that ignores the other elements that factor into why identities are successful or "good": identifiability, nostalgia, success, longevity, or simply because it looks cool even if it goes against one of those axioms of good design. In an effort to attain perfect, what makes identities like Ole Miss's good, can get stripped away. For example, adding red between the white shoulder stripes takes away from a key identifying feature of Ole Miss's football uniforms. They also look like Louisiana Tech in the mock-up. The mock-up doesn't have that quintessential Ole Miss look, even if it has arguably better color balance.

 

The look could be improved, but without respect to the context in which the uniform exists and why it looks like it does, it wouldn't be Ole Miss because it doesn't have those characteristics that are tied to Ole Miss's football identity.

 

(As for my own opinion on the uniforms they wore this past Saturday, some others pointed it out above: the regular grey pants would have made more sense. Rough Photoshop:)

 

[oldschoolvikings]

Ole Miss's crazy mismash of colors, stripe styles, and design elements are the very things that make the uniform so loved (by those of us that love them). Trying to "fix" the mess would drain all the fun out of it. In fact, they've done just that a few times and the last couple of decades and the results always suck and worse, don't look like Ole Miss.

 

Own the mess... It's beautiful.

[guest23]

3 hours ago, oldschoolvikings said:

Ole Miss's crazy mismash of colors, stripe styles, and design elements are the very things that make the uniform so loved (by those of us that love them). Trying to "fix" the mess would drain all the fun out of it. In fact, they've done just that a few times and the last couple of decades and the results always suck and worse, don't look like Ole Miss.

 

Own the mess... It's beautiful.

 

I also think that without fail teams that have attempted to clean up or improve upon historically mismatched/sub par sets end up going back to the previous mismatch uniforms out of nostalgia. 

[TenaciousG]

   

 

Is there a worse looking number than Miss State’s threes?

[KJTALBOT]

On ‎9‎/‎27‎/‎2020 at 2:26 PM, dont care said:

Is the helmet suppose to look like they took a blow torch like that or did the paint get rubbed off during the game?

This is one of the worst uniforms I have ever seen. It breaks all of the 3 Cs for good design. CONTRAST. COLOR and CONSISTENCY. It is wretched when Pitt has a beautiful, bright colored jersey and helmet combo. The panther logo would work if it were blue on the yellow helmet.