Oregon Featherweights
September 9, 2009 | Kevin Zdancewicz

The welcome return of college football is the big story is sports right now and the University of Oregon has been at the center of it for a couple of reasons. On Thursday night, the then-16th-ranked Ducks helped open the college football season with a late game (East Coast bias) against the then-14th-ranked Boise State Broncos. Though one of several big-time contests between ranked opponents this past weekend, the sloppy game that Boise State ended up winning failed to live up to the hype. Oregon fell from the rankings as a result and that could have been that, except that Oregon’s LeGarrette Blount postgame punch and the associated fallout (including a suspension for the rest of the season) kept the team in the sports news cycle through the weekend.

Surely, the team would have preferred less attention and a win, but the Ducks are no stranger to the national spotlight – especially when it comes to what the team is wearing. As has become the custom in recent years, Oregon took the field with new primary uniforms for the season with one of the road looks shown in today’s featured photo. I say primary because the Ducks actually debuted the jersey style last year, wearing the all-black winged version against Arizona. And I say one of the road sets because as always, the Oregon uniform package has more options than Jay-Z’s got problems (160 combinations to be exact). The Oregonian newspaper even created an online applet in which you can select your favorite combo (mine is white/white with green/green/white – and yes, I’ve spent a lot of free time there in the past week). The school will have five different jerseys, four unique helmets and pairs of pants, respectively, plus two choices for socks and shoes. You can see from the applet that Oregon has apparently added carbon to their color palette and created a strange helmet design to go with the addition. Ducks went all-white (including the white with green jersey) last Thursday to contrast with the blue turf, a look that was just a little bit cleaner than last year's uniforms for the Boise State game.

I’m not a big fan of the winged shoulders look. Ducks, in fact, do have wings, but the ones on the jersey make me think of a Native American necklace before Donald or Daffy. The diamond-plate design from the past few years was nothing special, but I still think it was a better look than the wings and was barely visible on the white uniforms. The road whites actually looked pretty good, but were lumped in with the other sets to be ugly by association.

You can play with the “Dress the Ducks” applet all you want, but how the uniforms look on the field is what really matters. We will have to keep an eye on Oregon during the season to see how the rest of the uni sets look – and to see how many of the 160 combinations are utilized over the year.

Jersey of the Week Archive