IMHO: College Football Uniforms are Sacred

I guess it's only fitting that my previous entry was at the end of the last college football season, and this one is celebrating the beginning of this one.
I don't know about you, but it's the same for me every year... on opening weekend of the NCAA College Football season, I simply can't get Andy Williams' jingle, "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year," out of my head.

The first weekend is already behind us, so any preseason-like predictions are almost obsolete, though I will say that of the most anticipated games of the season-openers, nothing particularly surprised me as far as outcomes go.  I expected Boise State to beat Georgia.  I expected LSU to beat Oregon... yes, I did...  I just didn't expect them to do it in such dominating and emasculating fashion.  I expected Auburn to beat Utah State - a team that was 1-10 versus SEC teams and that win came in 1970 against Kentucky.  I did not, however, expect Auburn to get a come-from-behind victory in the last three minutes of the game.

But what really caught my attention was, unfortunately, some attention-grabbing uniform changes.  The Oregon Ducks have had, without a doubt, the ugliest uniform combinations for the past few years.  It's surprising, really, that NIKE was the guilty designer behind that futuristic atrocity.  This year they came out against LSU looking Darth Vader-chic - black on black with black accents and black trim uniforms (pictured left), and despite an improvement on previous years, they still looked about as un-collegiate as a college uniform could look -- ABOUT as un-collegiate.  They were trumped by the new-look Georgia Bulldogs (pictured right).  There's really no diplomatic way to put it... the Bulldogs looked ridiculous.  They weren't just ugly, they looked like soldiers from a bad sci-fi movie.  I mean really... striped face masks???

While Oregon looked kind of cool, and Georgia looked completely laughable, they both looked like fictitious professional football teams from Oliver Stone's appallingly bad critique of American football, Any Given Sunday (which incidentally is a long, loud, exhausting waste of time).

What happened to the good ol' traditional college look?  Much of college football is wrapped up in tradition, but programs are beginning to jettison tradition for more marketable fan-gear, or perhaps programs are buying into the psychology that a tougher look yields tougher play.

Whatever the case, IMHO college football uniforms are a sacred part of longstanding tradition... and shouldn't be messed with.