Uniform Protocol

     Fandom, of course is a crazy thing. Fan is short for fanatic, and one of the examples of this is the affection, dedication, and downright evangelical nature of people’s feelings toward the uniforms of their favorite teams. Of course, there are also many sports fans who are aficionados of all things uniform, helmet, or cap.

     I am not a zealot in that regard, but I do have a fairly rich history. As a boy I would draw NFL helmets. No artist am I, but I would create a perfect circular starting point with a protractor and move on from there. Also, as an Astros fan since 1969, I have seen them go through countless uniforms, but their most famous version, the rainbow striped ones, was mainly mocked, but embraced by the true believers.

     This comes up in the context of Saturday’s uniform choice for the Kansas State Wildcats, rolling out throwbacks that made it the first game day that they had not sported a Power Cat on their helmets since Bill Snyder arrived and rebranded. K-State has used an alternate with a white helmet and Power Cat, but Saturday’s white helmets just said “’Cats” on the side.

     This has caused strong reactions on both sides of the fence. Many fans have considered it a sacrilege, the Power Cat such a symbol of the turnaround of the program, and any other past version merely a reminder of miserable times. Players almost always seem to embrace anything new, and that pretty much seemed to be the case with the K-State athletes.

     Throwback and alternate uniforms are such a common part of the landscape now that it is hard to believe that there once was a pretty hard and fast truism in college football. If you were trotting out new uniforms every few years, you basically sucked. I arrived at the University of Kansas in the mid to late seventies, and starting about then, they rolled through one uniform idea or another, confirming in the uniform landscape that existed at the time that they were a bad program.

     Among programs that actually can play the game at a high level, Oregon was the first team to truly embrace alternates consistently. Of course, they are the school of Phil Knight and Nike, and they basically were a test laboratory for whether a complete lack of consistency would be accepted. Clearly, it was.

     There are still quite a few iconic programs that seldom, or never, jack around with their traditional look. Michigan, USC, Alabama, Penn State, Texas, Iowa, and Oklahoma to an extent are among the programs that lean more on their traditions than not. Of course, they are also programs that don’t really need the cash that new merchandise can create, and also have the clout to ignore the desires of their apparel companies.

     Other sports have been slower to go down this road, although inroads have been made everywhere. Baseball was actually the first sport to try and go in a different direction, and the late seventies and eighties were populated with powder blues everywhere, a trend that was short lived. Among the efforts generally thought to be the most hideous, at least at the time, were the Cleveland Indians all red uniforms, and the gloriously silly White Sox shorts below an extremely vintage jersey.

     Currently in baseball, multiple uniforms are extremely common. Between standard alternates, throwbacks, Negro League tributes, cancer awareness, military tributes and more, a team might head onto the field in fifteen different uniforms in a given season. Of course, there are iconic franchises that don’t deviate very often, with the Yankees, Dodgers, Cubs, Cardinals, and Red Sox staying very much true to their heritage. Heck, these teams really can’t do much on their throwback days, the Yankees regular uniforms ARE throwbacks.

     There certainly are rampant superstitions in the uniform arena. I was a pretty rabid Dallas Cowboys fan from the time I was a young boy until the early nineties. In the late seventies the Cowboys tried out a slightly different uniform scheme at home, with a darker blue, and more square and prominent numbers. But they lost a few games in these duds, and now they pretty religiously wear white at home.

     I still remember the horror I felt when my favorite player, Bob Hayes, switched from the old-timey two bar face mask, to the more modern squarish version. It just didn’t seem right to me. He was also starting to decline as a player and I pretty much felt that the face mask was to blame.

     Really, except for a few teams like the Celtics, Lakers, and Bulls, pro basketball has been very cavalier about uniforms. This also has been accelerated by the fact that there has been more franchise shifting in that sport than just about any other, except maybe hockey.

     Hockey jerseys, sometimes still called sweaters, despite the fact that they long since have not used materials that are anything sweater like, to me are the best uniforms out there. There is one simple reason that the designs stand out more. There are no numbers on the front of a hockey jersey, allowing for a clean look at the logo. The Toronto Maple Leafs home blue jersey, while it has undergone minor changes through the years, is my choice for top jersey ever. I am not anywhere close to a Leafs fan, but I have one of those.

     And, of course, in the last few years, Americans has more and more become familiar, and greater fans of soccer, both in this country and abroad, and have seen what is shockingly still unique in the major sports, and that is prominent sponsorship display. Basically, the major sponsor is the name on the jersey, not the team name. Sporting KC will be switching sponsors, so Ivy Funds will not be on the front of the jerseys after this season. My Premier League team is Arsenal, but as far as the uniform is concerned, I am rooting for Emirates Airlines. Watching vintage footage of any player through the years in soccer we see gobs of alternate uniforms, and a standard part of the sport’s marketing appeal, is the “alternate kits”.

     Also, if you watch old footage of Premier League action, perhaps no uniform style has changed more than soccer. In the period of the late nineties and into the mid 2000’s, extremely baggy uniforms tucked in at the waist are about as far removed from today’s form fitting, physique-revealing garb as you can get. This was somewhat mirrored by basketball, which went from the bun-huggers of the 60’s and 70’s, then incrementally moving all the way to absurdly huge shorts that reached the mid-shin, before the pendulum swung back to the median of today, although in the last couple of years, a few players have come pretty darn close to bun hugger land.  

     Kansas State fans sure as heck didn’t want to see their team to lose on Saturday. But for a segment of the fans base, there was a pretty likely silver lining to the loss to West Virginia. It’s probably going to be a long time, if ever, that the white helmets with “‘Cats” emblazoned on the side will see the light of day.