New, but not necessarily better

Mike Tanier has an article about fashion, of a sort, in The New York Times:

The right side of the helmet was covered in a black and gold diagonal checkerboard pattern. The left side displayed a red and white cross. The patterns extended from the helmet to the shoulders, and some players accentuated them with similarly styled armbands. The uniform suggested many things: a quilting bee enhanced by Jell-O shots, a team of jesters in the time of Lord George Calvert, a Project Runway challenge to make high fashion out of a state flag gone horribly wrong.
It was the University of Maryland’s Maryland Pride football uniform, the latest in a trend of bold jersey and helmet designs that, depending on one’s tastes, can be described as fashion forward, garish, or blindness-inducing. Perhaps for that reason, the jersey was not put on sale to the general public. No problem, really, for Maryland intends to use at least four other jerseys this season, all of which will be for sale.
Professional and college teams have long been pushing the boundaries of taste and commercialism with their uniforms, prepared to abandon tradition in pursuit of consumer dollars. But this year the trend has become something of a frenzy, with uniforms changing week to week, and the apparel makers and universities becoming quite frank about what’s at play.
“The trend in uniform design is more toward making costumes for superheroes than uniforms for athletes,” said Paul Lukas, athletic uniform reporter for ESPN and editor of the website Uni-Watch.com. Lukas is often critical of both noisy fashion statements and the manufacturers and universities that make them. “Last night a very foolish school and a very foolish company showed just how desperate for attention they are,” he wrote after the Maryland game.
These uniforms, if they make traditionalists wince and sportswriters snicker, do seem to excite recruits and move younger fans to break out their credit cards. The Maryland Pride uniform was a “special occasion” design, so those who somehow missed it during the Terrapins’ victory over Miami on 5 September, or the fashion police dragnet that followed, might have to wait awhile before seeing it again.
But there are plenty of other college football uniforms to be delighted or offended by. For example, there is Arizona State’s new look, which includes a redesigned Sun Devils pitchfork on the helmet that resembles a medieval alchemy symbol crossed with a corporate flow chart. Georgia is suddenly ablaze in candy-apple red. Oregon, the trailblazer in the unorthodox, has worn dozens of uniform combinations in the past five years, and has hundreds of variations that it can go with. Oklahoma State, meanwhile, is vying to become the Oregon of the Great Plains by making fiery orange the new yellow.
Each week seems to bring a new innovation, and every major contest becomes a turn on the runway. Saturday’s Michigan-Notre Dame game was the debut of retro-inspired uniforms that recalled the days of flagpole sitting.
The Army-Navy game will also be a fashion show of sorts, too, going public with what the service academies and Nike call Pro Combat uniforms. Navy gets a gold anchor on the helmet, and Army gets block-stenciled uniform numbers.
The company responsible for the most controversial uniform, the Maryland outfits out on Labor Day, is Under Armour, a Baltimore-based manufacturer that leads Nike in the American athletic apparel market but is trying to catch up in the overall athletic market, which includes footwear. Kevin Plank, the co-founder of Under Armour, played football at Maryland. He now sits on its board of trustees. Maryland signed a five-year, $17.5 million deal that began in 2009 for his company to provide uniforms for all varsity teams. His relationship with the university is often compared to the one the Nike chief executive Phil Knight has with Oregon, his alma mater.
The Maryland football program has had minimal success in recent years and, in trying to increase its visibility in the Baltimore-Washington region, embarked on a Maryland Pride promotional campaign. The uniforms, the result of a collaboration between the university and the manufacturer, are a major part.
“They challenged us from a design standpoint,” said Matt Mirchin, Under Armour’s senior vice president for sports marketing. “They wanted to instill some pride from a state perspective.”
The flag-emblazoned uniforms are now sidelined indefinitely and are not even for sale, but Maryland players will take the field each week in one of four different jerseys, four different pant styles, and two variant helmets. (The four alternate jerseys are for sale.)
Team captains will select the uniform combinations in the week before kickoff, so there is no telling what Maryland will wear for Saturday’s home game against Number Eighteen West Virginia. “It’s a secret,” joked Shawn Nestor, a Maryland spokesman.
The bright color schemes created by Under Armour and other manufacturers reflect current off-field fashion trends. “We are seeing a surge of luminous, bright colors for menswear,” said Giang Cao, the menswear editor for Fashionising. Still, Cao called the Pride uniforms “a weird mishmash of patterns” that runs “opposite the current trend of block minimalism”.
Aside from appealing to younger consumers, trendy uniforms can give teams a recruiting edge. Maryland coach Randy Edsall told The Baltimore Sun that recruits at the Miami game were “in awe” of the new uniforms.
The conservative, almost square Michigan, Notre Dame, Army, and Navy uniforms show that not every new design is aimed at teenagers. But programs like Michigan and Notre Dame have a luxury Maryland does not share: the ability to promote their storied histories. “We went the retro-heritage route, which with these two programs makes all the sense in the world,” said Mark Daniels, the director of football and team sports for Adidas, manufacturer of the Michigan and Notre Dame uniforms. With clients like Michigan, Notre Dame, Wisconsin, UCLA, and Tennessee, Adidas outfits many universities with very traditional uniform styles. But Daniels said that the manufacturer would be unveiling some bolder concepts before the end of the season, and was braced for the inevitable criticism. “You judge it through the lens of: what did the student-athlete think?” he said. Certainly, no one in the uniform space race is hiding the bottom-line goals. “We’re always looking to expand our footprint and further the program at the same time,” Daniels said.
Nestor, the Maryland spokesman, said of his university’s relationship with Under Armour, “They’re trying to increase their visibility, and so are we.”
Despite the outside criticism, it seems that Maryland students and fans gave the uniforms enthusiastic reviews. Even the university’s alumni bucked the traditionalist stereotype: Alex Gross graduated from Maryland in 1977 and had season tickets for 25 years; he says the Maryland Pride uniforms gave his team both a recruiting and an on-field advantage. “I thought they were intimidating,” he said. “Though I think the armbands may have gone a little too far.”

Rico says think what you will of garish uniforms, it's a way to sell more at the college bookstore. (But "athletic uniform reporter for ESPN"? That's gotta be a limited job...) Rico says his father, a Naval Academy graduate, never fails to see the Army-Navy game; this year's will be interesting...