Such a thing would have been absurd just a few years ago, when most teams had two uniforms — home and away — and all anyone needed was a pocket schedule to know which would be worn on a given Saturday in the fall, if they cared at all.
But that was before the major sports apparel companies, led by Nike, began to see outfitting college football teams as a huge marketing opportunity. That was before Maryland, in September 2008, signed a reported five-year, $17.5 million deal with Maryland-based Under Armour to outfit its athletic teams.
And that was before the Terrapins burst onto the field at Byrd Stadium in College Park on the night of Sept. 5 in some of the most outlandish uniforms — featuring aspects of the Maryland state flag on the helmet, shoulder pads, cleats and arm-warmers — ever witnessed in college football.
It wasn’t the Terrapins’ 32-24 win over Miami that was the talk of the sports world the next day. It was their uniforms. And these days, it takes something extraordinary to get the attention of the sports fashion police.
If you have turned on the television in the first half of September to immerse yourself in the familiar rituals of college football, you may have been in for a visual shock. Some of the most prominent teams in the country have undergone radical redesigns of their uniforms — some permanently, others for one selected game this season.
On Sept. 3, the Georgia Bulldogs wore futuristic uniforms featuring two-tone face masks. Last weekend, Notre Dame and Michigan played each other in “throwback” uniforms — although alumni of the latter grumbled that the Wolverines’ uniforms resembled nothing the team had ever worn in the past. On Tuesday, Navy and Army revealed the futuristic, but tasteful, duds they will be wearing in their annual matchup on Dec. 10 at FedEx Field.
The special Georgia, Navy and Army uniforms are part of Nike’s Pro Combat “fully integrated uniform system.” (Pro Combat” is something of a double oxymoron, since college football players are, by definition, not pro, and combat references by the media are, by tradition, considered unseemly in describing sports, particularly when it comes to the service academies.)
For Under Armour, as for Nike, the investment more than pays for itself — not just in jersey and merchandise sales but in the exposure the company gets from the team’s visibility, particularly when the story goes national as it did with the Terrapins.
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