One of the most common complaints I have heard regarding marriage equality is it’s a slippery slope. If marriage equality is allowed to redefine marriage, then eventually “bigamist, polygamist, incestuous or various other deviants,” to quote an online comment on a recent Alligator column, will be allowed to redefine marriage as well.
This column is not a response to that slope.
Instead, there is another slope we are on. The litany of horrible, eye-burning designs of college sports uniforms that garner the most TV time.
We can pretty much attribute the uniform craze to the University of Oregon. The Ducks have a well-documented partnership with Nike founder Phil Knight due to him attending the school in the ’50s. Nike provides the football team with a different uniform each game, which has become an identity and a tradition for the team. They were able to create an identity based on crazy aesthetic designs with their equipment. They have extended that identity past uniforms to the hardwood of the basketball court, which is designed to look like the court is in the middle of a forest.
The problem starts with schools with a long history and tradition. The University of California, Los Angeles, whose 10 different men’s basketball titles under John Wooden alone rival all of Oregon’s championships across all sports, donned a Zubaz-inspired uniform during this year’s NCAA men’s basketball championship tournament, much to the chagrin of fans and alumni.
The University of Georgia just revealed its logo and uniform have been redesigned. UF has even changed its uniforms, sacrificing a pleasing design for the sake of announcers being able to provide faster details about who made a play. And let’s not forget about when the University Athletic Association abandoned the “Gators” script in favor of bland white helmets featuring a boring “F” for a couple games in 2009. Occasional alternate jerseys for special games are one thing, but abandoning the style fans have come to love for the sake of attracting one more recruit or selling one more uniform is akin to placing a comments-and-concerns box over a shredder. It’s almost as bad as changing the Spring football game to a mere public practice.
Logan Ladnyk is a journalism junior at UF. His columns run on Fridays. You can contact him via opinions@alligator.org.
