K-Uniform Review: SE Missouri State

KU started the football season this weekend and for the first time in program history, they let the fans choose the uniforms for the game. And, let’s be honest, the fans did a pretty nice job, although they did have a two out of three chance to look decent, so it was a pretty easy task. This uniform combo was my second choice out of the three (see preferences below) but, considering this was the first home game, this set would have been even lower on the list if the choices included more traditional uniforms featuring more blue. But, overall they did look pretty good out there on Saturday. I was pleasantly surprised.

The Best Feature

KU’s red helmets with the angry Jayhawk look better this year because the logo is considerably bigger. Comparing this helmet to last year’s helmet (which I liked), I feel it is a huge improvement. The Hawk looks more menacing and the proportions on the helmet look better. It will be interesting to see if all the helmets feature a larger logo as none of them did in the promotion for the fan vote.

I think we can all agree that these helmets are pretty cool, but it has always been my opinion that red should be used as an accent color at KU. It works so much better as an outline and stripe color. The red just confuses me (I’m old and KU only wore blue for the impressionable years of my existence) and I’d rather see blue. But, in this case, the helmets accented the rest of the set perfectly. They looked sharp.

The red/blue/white looked great together and featured all of the school colors. There was enough blue on the jersey and the thick pants stripe to placate the traditionalist like me, while the red added a nice contrast. These combos looked good enough that I think they could try something similar on the road with a red/white/blue combo.

Overall Grade: A-

How’d the Teams Look Together?

Sometimes one team will look great and the other will be a stinker. Sometimes, they both suck. And other times, you get a really nice looking football game. So in regards to being completely aesthetically pleasing, let’s look at KU and SE Missouri together.

SE Missouri debuted white helmets for the first time in school history on Saturday and I like them. As far as needless secondary chrome helmets go, this one is a winner. The lines are clean and the design is nice. The number on the opposite side was a nice touch. Maybe they knew that KU would be wearing their red helmets, and opted to wear the whites Saturday to give the game some contrast (If so, that fan voting was a sham!). But maybe (more likely), they realized that Kansas is a big opponent and more eyes will be on them this game than the rest of their games combined. Not sure, but either way, they look sharp.

SEMO went with a white/white/black uniform that contrasted nicely with KU. Not much else to say about this game other than when the teams lined up against each other, both teams were easy to identify and looked pretty good against each other.

Now let’s take a look to see how I did when I predicted this in the 2014 uniform preview column last week. Here’s what I said:

Prediction: Red/Blue/White

Preference: White/Blue/White.

Now, I must say that this was one of the easier games to pick considering that there were only three choices, so I don’t expect to be this accurate the rest of the season. For the record, I’m counting it as three points if I predicted it correctly, but only one if my preference appears on the field, kind of like a win and a tie in soccer. There are 36 points possible this season. As it stands, here are my "official" stats after the first week with bold indicating correct guesses.

Key: B=Blue, W=White, R=Red, LG=Light Grey, DG=Dark Grey, CC=Crimson Chrome