Lee mentioned how much we miss the old Pitt unis. It’s a sad loss. Pitt abandoned the old colors that you couldn’t really identify. The blue was kind of a darker, dingier royal/medium blue, while the yellow was a mustardy but not quite yellow. Even in our banner at the top, it is just a rough approximation using HTML colors of Mediumblue and Gold. I’m lucky, in that I have an old color jersey (#20 – Billy West) that I got just before the color shift in ’97.

The new colors are boring, corporate, and commonplace. It reminds me of the San Diego Chargers present colors (Navy/dark blue and gold), versus their old baby/powder blue and light yellow. They now break them out once a year as throwbacks, and they just look so much cooler. That’s all we would want at this point. Just once a year. Preferably at the Backyard Brawl.

Here’s what a couple college kids who decided to evaluate college football jerseys had to say:

It all went to pot for Pittsburgh when they made a big deal of changing the name of the school to “Pittsburgh” because “Pitt” sounded too negative. College boards have too much time to think, I guess. When they were Pitt, their mascot was always mentioned with the name. Panthers was the official mascot, but for all intents and purposes, the mascot was the Pitt-Panthers, like the Nittany Lions. Pitt-Panthers was cool. Panthers, by itself, is lame. The corresponding uniform change was one of the worst uni changes ever seen in collegiate sports. They used to have a late-70’s early-80’s kinda funky, kinda ugly, off-blue, off-yellow affair going on. The “Pitt” on the side of the helmet was done in a charming Comic Sans bold meets cursive font. It is important to realize that just like tough doesn’t make a good mascot, ugly does not make bad uniforms. The new uniforms are amazingly bad. Gold and black are not cool if you come to these colors late in the game, and the panther-head thing on the helmet looks like Beowulf’s Grendel as drawn by the troubled comic book fan at the back of the class.

Ouch. They also make a point in noting that the Big East teams may have the worst collection of uniforms of any conference. They have a point.