At Least They Looked Good
October 21,
2009 | Kevin
Zdancewicz
Back in the early
days of JOTW on the old Fanatic Magazine
website, one of my friends sent me a photo of the Colorado State
football
uniforms as a suggestion for an article. I agreed with him that it was
a solid
look, but never got around to featuring them for a week (Brooks, file
this
under “better late than never”). I caught some of the TCU-CSU game this
past
Saturday and though the Rams were taken behind the woodshed 44-6, they
looked
pretty good (jersey-wise) doing it.
I’ve
decided recently that an underutilized color scheme
like Colorado State’s green and gold (or the Vancouver Canuck’s royal
and green
from last time’s JOTW) is a major plus: a solid uni design gains extra
points
in my eyes just for not being an overused combination like black and
red, navy and
gold, or maroon and anything. For instance, I think navy and gold is a
great
color combo, but it’s hard to argue that it’s not overused or that it
doesn’t
regularly provide scenes that seem less like actual games and more like
intrasquad scrimmages. I also have an affinity
for solid
color
pants with white jerseys so CSU’s featured road uniforms are acing
my
evaluation (though it pains me to see them sometimes wear this). You might remember that one of my
favorite
college
uniforms belongs to another school from the Mountain
West
Conference (note the solid color pants). There must be something in
the
water out there.
Anyways,
the uniforms themselves are pretty simple: no stripes or patterns on the jerseys and
minimal
piping on
the respective white and gold pants. Adding a simple or traditional
shoulder stripe
could liven up the jersey a bit, but as it stands the main attraction
of the
set is the classic spiral horns helmet
design made famous by the NFL’s Rams franchise. According to the Helmet
Project, a reputable but not infallible reference on the subject,
the NFL’s
Rams began wearing the first variation of the horn design on their
helmet in
1964 with Colorado State following suit in 1973. (It’s also currently
worn by
Division I-AA Rhode Island and was used a couple decades ago by I-AA
Fordham). I
think it’s cool when teams use a helmet logo to give off the illusion
of
something attached to the players heads and even though it’s borrowed
from the
pros, CSU is still the only Division I-A school using the classic
design. In
the end, it’s just another great element of a great college football
uniform
set.
Photo Courtesy of ESPN.com
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