College Retro Stripes
March 24, 2009
| Kevin
Zdancewicz
We’ve talked
about throwbacks
here at Jersey of the Week before with the “Kicking It Old School”
series
(baseball edition coming this spring!). The throwback concept has been
embraced
my many leagues and many teams as a cool reason to wear something
different
while honoring a franchise’s history at the same time. But throwback
designs
are usually worn minimally: it may be a one-time “retro night” or only
every-so-often. Another phenomenon altogether is the act of making a
retro-inspired jersey or a design that was used some other time in the
team’s
history a full-time uniform.
An interesting
case of this has
popped up recently in college basketball with multiple teams adopting
uniforms
with retro stripes around the collar, cuffs, and side panels. The
University of
Alabama (featured photo above) is one of the best examples. The Crimson
Tide has
this striping element on each of its uniforms, which are especially fascinating for
the
simple
lettering and the vertical stripes down the side of the jersey and
shorts. DePaul
University also features some sweet retro stripes on its home and road uniforms. This stripe style – which is
based
on this old school design – is different from Alabama’s,
but
intriguing nonetheless with the thinner horizontal stripes as compared
to the
next school. Marquette
is the third team to rock retro-striped uniforms, which are based on the
school’s 1974 jerseys. The Golden Eagles try to modernize the look with shoulder panels and the three-colored stripes no
doubt make
this one of the most vivid uniform sets in college basketball.
With this retro
striping trend,
some regular season games are starting to look like a trip down memory
lane.
But games like that are already prone to happen because of a number of schools
that wear rather plain designs that aren’t much different
from
uniforms worn for decades previously. The difference is that many
of
these
schools have simply never changed their uniforms, similar to the Yankees in baseball. This is what makes college basketball
retro
stripes more in line with NFL’s Jets or Giants is that like these New York franchises,
schools that
wear retro stripes now have had different designs in the interim since
the last
time their uniforms featured them. Retro stripes were a certain uniform
element
that was used in the past, eventually fell out of commonplace, and is
now
unique when reintroduced. So the game looks normal when DePaul or
Marquette
plays a team with "modern" uniforms, but at the same time, an Alabama-Arkansas
game looks remarkably similar to
something
like this. Finally, an article on this topic can not
neglect
mentioning another team whose uniforms haven’t changed much over the years and
have
another example, albeit not on the uniform, of retro stripes.
Photo Courtesy
of RollTide.com
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