Well, first off — if you haven’t already — take a moment and look at the pictures of our team’s new football uniforms. Study them, and then come on back to PSB.

Let’s start with the colors. As you all know by now, I prefer the old royal blue and mustard yellow to this new navy blue and “Vegas Gold” crap. But I’ve resigned myself to the fact that maybe I’m just getting old, and either way, the new colors are here to stay. Fine enough. Our colors are navy blue and Vegas Gold.
SO @#%*@#! STICK WITH THEM, ALREADY! As was first pointed out by Jaime, the blue in the word “PITT” on the helmet blatantly doesn’t match either the blue of the face mask or the blue of the jersey/pants. It makes things look sloppy before we can even talk about anything else. I always thought that the biggest reason why UCLA looks so terrible is because the blue of their helmet script doesn’t even come CLOSE to the blue of their jerseys.

Speaking of script, yeah, I would have preferred the classic script “Pitt” on the helmets instead of this new block “PITT” (and I don’t give a @#*% what Jock Sutherland used to wear, THIS IS NEW). But that being said, I’m so happy to be Pitt once again that I’ll take it. At least when I wear a “PITT” hat around State College, the stupid hicks will be able to figure out that I’m a fan of the school and not just the “Pittsburgh” community in general.

Now on to the jerseys. Unlike Jaime, I don’t have a problem with them removing the word “Pittsburgh” from the jerseys and replacing it with “Panthers.” Given that the helmet says “PITT,” anything else might seem a little redundant (and once again, we’re Pitt dammit — not Pittsburgh). And the new numbers don’t bother me too much either. The old, rough-edged, allegedly “steel-hewn” numbers were just plain hard-to-read for those of us who have never seen a working steel mill to begin with.

As you can see on the post below, my first comment on the new unis was thus a sigh of relief. Yeah, the blue doesn’t match, but at least we’re Pitt again. And then Jaime pointed out something I had missed… something so painful that perhaps my subconscious was trying to hide it from me when I first glanced at the pictures…

…yeah, the limp-wristed Denver Broncos body stripes on the jersey and pants. Over the past few years, I’ve had a field day making fun of teams that gave up their classic looks for that arena league crap. What, didn’t Miami have enough success in their old solid orange jerseys? Temple, Indiana, and (for the most part) Maryland and Utah always sucked anyways. Oregon’s uniforms were a national joke before the body stripes were added. But West Virginia!? Surely, somebody down in the coal patches had more pride in the classic post-1980 Mountaineers look than that!

But now, we’re no better than the jumping-on-the-latest-fad Hurricanes and Mountaineers — like an awkward teenager trying to act cool at his first South Oakland keg party. At least our body stripes continue out underneath the sleeves, instead of curving in towards the center of the chest. That, in particular, looks like it belongs on a figure skater’s uniform. At least we’ll always have that over the Canes and the Hoopies.

So mostly because of the body stripes, I do not like the new unis. Thanks to Pitt, I’m starting to distrust all uniform changes. Why can’t somebody just pick a look and stick with it? Ohio State hasn’t changed its look since 1968, Michigan hasn’t changed its since 1969, and both are among the top five merchandise sellers. Come to think of it, I haven’t changed my overweight slob look since about 1996.

Hail to more conservative uniform changes next year. And make no mistake, Lion fan, your unis still suck worse.