Sunday Morning Uni Watch – Uni Watch
Good Sunday Morning, Uni Watchers. Welcome to Sunday Morning Uni Watch. I hope everyone had a good Saturday.
Now then.
I won’t quite say it’s become de rigueur for Southern Schools to begin recognizing the past accomplishments of their pioneering Black players, vis-a-vis creating a special alternate uniform to wear, but Mississippi State did do just that earlier this year. Oklahoma joined Miss State yesterday by creating a special anthracite-for-anthracite’s-sake (AFAS) uniform to honor former running back Prentice Gautt, who was the first Black scholarship football player at OU. According to Sooner Sports,
Saturday’s uniform will feature anthracite-colored jerseys, pants and helmets, crimson trim and lettering, the word “TOGETHER” sewn on the collar, the word “UNITY” on the back-of-the-jersey nameplate and an outline of the state of Oklahoma amid a triple-stripe on both sleeves.
Now, by and large, Oklahoma has (and has almost always had) pretty good looking uniforms, and the team could have certainly chosen to honor Gautt with a throwback or fauxback (like Miss State did). Instead, they created a dark, kinda muddy-looking uniform that totally didn’t look like Oklahoma, and certainly wasn’t resembling anything Gautt ever wore. Let’s take a closer look.
As you can see — head to toe AFAS, including the helmet. Unfortunately, Oklahoma’s actual school color, crimson, was chosen for the stripes and numbers, with white making a very thin appearance on the helmet, and as an outline for the numbers and “OKLAHOMA” chest mark. There was also a crimson northwestern striping pattern on the sleeve caps and down the pants. A state of Oklahoma patch (or perhaps it was sewn in) was rendered on the stripes of the sleeve cap. I say unfortunately because this provided almost no contrast, making the numbers almost unreadable at any distance. I watched a good chunk of this game on TV and for all the long shots, and even some close ones, it was impossible to make out the numbers, and the crimson and dark gray just blended together for the most part. Up close (and in the shade) the numbers and chest mark were legible, but it still didn’t look great.
As mentioned above, the players all wore “UNITY” as NOB — and since that was in white, those were easy to read. Too bad they didn’t consider doing the same for the numbers, using a crimson outline. Of course, the jumpman, OU and Big XII logos were all in white too, because we wouldn’t want those to be illegible.
You can see lots more photos form the game here.
And with that, we now move on to Terry Duroncelet (to be followed by Wade Heidt with the CUUW), who’ll take you through the rest of your…
by Terry Duroncelet, Jr.
From Wednesday:
• Marshall/Louisiana: Marshall embraced my October Offer by wearing all-black against Louisiana.
From Thursday:
• West Virginia/Baylor: A reprisal of last week’s Big XII affair between Baylor and Oklahoma State, but flipped, and with a touch more contrast.
• UCF/Temple: Space U uniforms VI: This Time, it’s a Periphery Reference for UCF. Here’s a closer look at the helmets.
From Friday:
• FIU/UTSA: Florida International hosted a really cool Vice Night on Friday. I loved the field, but the unis felt like a half-effort. The helmets were NICE, I just wish that they did more with the uniforms.
• SMU/Navy: Nothing uni-notable, except for SMU wearing their regular home unis, as if to say “Oh wait, that’s right, the Dallas unis are alternates” (let’s be honest, at this point, they’re alts in name-only).
• Princeton/Brown: I think this is the 2nd or 3rd Ivy League mention in a row (week-wise). Princeton wore Progress Flag variants of their tiger logo against Brown. Reason being is because former Princeton Offensive Lineman Mason Darrow participated in the opening coin toss on Friday night, and he came out as gay back in 2015. I’m super-ecstatic to see this! For as much progress in the realm of representation as we’ve seen in the last decade-ish or so, you never see much in the way of LGBTQ+ representation in the sporting realm. Literally the only one outside of Darrow that I can think of is Michael Sam. It makes me feel a little less lonely as a nonbinary individual myself.
From Saturday:
• It was a regular script party on Saturday, featuring offerings from Michigan State, Mississippi State, Troy, East Carolina (complete with pseudo-retros), South Alabama, and probably a couple others that I may have missed.
• Michigan/Penn State: As much as I (normally) HATE Michigan in all-navy, I will say that the flat finish pairs well with the gloomy weather in Ann Arbor yesterday. And as mentioned before, all uni-crimes (sans advert-driven) are welcome during the month of October.
• TCU/Oklahoma St.: New blood lids (to go with the grey alts) for TCU (another look).
• Georgia/Vanderbilt: I don’t know what it is, but vandy looks good in white/white/black.
• Ole Miss/Auburn: Ole Miss (appt for a Southern State) is both too late AND too early in bringing out the stars ‘n’ stripes in their game against Auburn (with the seldom-seen white facemasks).
• Illinois/Minnesota: Apart from the STELLAR-looking game, there was a graphic goof (thanks to @tlschwerz on Twitter for the spot).
• Coastal Carolina/Old Dominion: Two teams that I’m happy are growing, in what I feel like is the rare daytime game for the Chanticleers (yes, this is an excuse to use the word “Chanticleers”).
• Michigan State/Wisconsin: ‘State’ script helmets for the Spartans.
• Duke/UNC: Duke in their spooktacular black alts against North Carolina, who wore something I haven’t seen them wear in ages: the light blue chrome lids!
• BYU/Arkansas: BYU wore some neat mural helmets against Arkansas (better look). Must’ve been something in the air in the State of Utah, because…
• Utah/USC: Utah also wore custom painted helmets against USC. These carried serious weight to them, as they were made in honor of their fallen teammates Aaron Lowe and Ty Jordan.
• Florida/LSU: Florida wore Tom Petty tribute decals against LSU. Also from that game: you want some bumper with your neck?
Canadian University Uni Watch
New for 2022 is Canadian University Uni Watcher Wade Heidt, who has joined the SMUW crew this year and will bring us some looks at three-down, 110-yard Canadian university football from up north. That’s Wade to the right side of your screen (you can even click to enlarge). The shirt Wade is wearing was created by the one and only Wafflebored! Wade’s rundown will appear every week on SMUW until the season ends.
Enjoy!
Canadian University Uni Watch
by Wade Heidt
You know it! Time for some university football uniform watching Canadian rules style! It’s time for the CUUW!
Another autumn weekend means an opportunity to enjoy U Sports football. We will travel the country from east to west as we usually do.
-In the Atlantic conference (AUS), the Saint Mary’s Huskies broke out some BFBS at home in Halifax. Wearing a maroon/black/maroon combo. We do have some fans out there who love the uniforms of the visiting Mount Allison Mounties. The Mounties wore a white over gold combo this weekend.
-In the Quebec conference (RSEQ), the McGill Redbirds wore the usual red over red at home in Montreal. The visiting Sherbrooke Vert & Or went with their gold/white/white combo.
-In the Ontario conference (OUA), the Wilfrid Laurier Golden Hawks went full mono-purple at home in Waterloo. Purple from helmet to pants. The visiting Guelph Gryphons went with their red/white/red combo. A good-looking game here.
Since we missed the Canada West conference last week , we will look at two games out west.
-For the first time in 23 years, the Alberta Golden Bears played a home game at Edmonton’s Commonwealth Stadium. The Golden Bears usually play on campus at the smaller capacity Foote Field. It was the Battle of Alberta. The Golden Bears wore full athletic gold at home from helmet to pants. The visiting Calgary Dinos wore full mono-white. They wore the white helmet featuring the dinosaur paw print logo.
-Meanwhile in Saskatoon, it was the Battle of Saskatchewan. The undefeated Saskatchewan Huskies going with the green over grey combo at home. Much to my dismay, the Regina Rams went gold (beige?) over gold as the visitors. The Rams love their khakis. For a meaningful game like this they should have worn their nice white jerseys with green or white pants.
We will look forward to watching the regular season home stretch in the last half of October. The playoffs to travel the road to the Vanier Cup are nearby.
MLB Playoff Jersey Tracking
MLB Playoff Uni Tracking
It was QUITE a Saturday for baseball — the Phils knocked off the defending champs — advancing to the NLCS — and the longest ever 0-0 game ended in brutal fashion for the Mariners, who succumbed to the Astros in a 1-0 loss, putting Houston in the ALCS. And the Guardians were down to their last strike before a dramatic, come-from-behind (down 5-3 entering the ninth) 6-5 victory over the Yanks. Cleveland can advance to the ALCS today with another victory over New York. Oh, and then, just because baseball, the San Diego Padres came back from a 3-0 deficit to knock off the 111-win LA Dodgers. So in the NL, the five and six seeds (Padres and Phillies) will now face off for the right to go to the World Series. In the space of less than a week, two 101 win teams (Mets, Atlanta) and one 111 win team all failed to advance to the Championship Series. The Dodgers not only finished 22 games ahead of the Friars in the standings, they beat them 14-5 in games during the regular season. You can’t predict baseball.
Our longtime tracker Alex Rocklein has all the jerseys covered again. He’ll be back next weekend with all the League Championship games yet to come (and the final LDS jersey tallies), and keep us up-to-date through the end of the World Series.
Below are the Divisional Series (so far, but excluding the score of last evening’s Padres/Dodgers game), and overall playoff tracking graphics (click to enlarge). Enjoy!
Divisional Series:
Full Tracker:
Thanks Alex! We look forward to all your playoff tracking in 2022.
And Now a Few Words From Paul
Hello! In case you missed it on Friday, my NBA Season Preview is now available over on my new Substack page. All of my Bulletin archives have likewise carried over to Substack. If you always wanted to subscribe to my Premium content but were unwilling to do so because Bulletin was owned by Facebook, I hope you’ll now consider subscribing via Substack. You can find more info about all of this in Friday’s lede.
That’s it for me. Now back to Phil!
And finally…
…that’s it for today, and for me for the weekend. Many thanks, as always, to TJ and Wade for their wonderful contributions to the Sunday Morning Uni Watch. Still to come are Jimmer Vilk’s Five and One, as well as the Power 5 Uni Tracking from Rex Henry, Dennis Bolt, James Hill and Ethan Dimitroff. Those sections will be published shortly. The Ticker for today should go live at 9:00 am.
Everyone have a good Sunday and a better week, and I’ll catch you back here again next Saturday. Enjoy the games today!
Peace,
PH