K-Uniform Review: Kansas State

No. God, please no. No. No. No. Yep.

After going ten straight games without any red elements, KU broke out their red jerseys last weekend, but when paired with the blue helmet and grey pants, the look is solid. Saturday was an aesthetic abomination.

Where to start? How about with the red pants. If the jersey is capable of looking good on it’s own, it obviously isn’t the problem. But when KU tries to go full "blood clot" or "Crimson Chrome" or whatever you want to call that monstrosity we saw on Saturday, it is a full on clown show. All red doesn’t look good on anyone in football, and it looks terrible on a team whose primary color is blue. I gave a good review when KU went all blue, and I gave a great critique when they went "whiteout", but this is an eyesore.

Saturday also marked the third helmet of the season, and the first time that we’ve seen the shiny chrome lid since its inception in Charlie Weis’ final game at the helm of KU football. Can we go ahead and mothball this thing? Even with the changes made to the helmet, it still looks out of place.

There are two logos on the helmet and neither of them are cohesive with this design for two reasons. One, the colored chrome Jayhawk on the helmet does not match the silver chrome Jayhawk on the shoulders and pants. This is accentuated when the two are seen close together as happened on nearly every play and close-up of the game that featured the right side of a KU player. Secondly, the KU wordmark on the helmet is white outlined in blue while the numbers on the jersey are blue outlined in chrome (looks white in the right light). It just looks wrong.

Next, a stripe was added to these helmets, just as they were to all the other helmets, but the red pants in this getup are the only pants in KU’s wardrobe that do not feature a thick stripe. Therefore, the helmet stripe looks really out of place. Next year, they could ad red pants that have a stripe, or better yet, just get rid of the red helmet and red pants and pretend like they never existed.

And as one final slam, why do we seem to try to get fancy (read: dress like clowns) when we play K-State? Despite what everyone wants to believe, this is our rival, and when we play them, on that day, we should look the most like Kansas that we can. It’s a shame that the entire season played itself out and KU never wore their blue helmets with their blue jerseys and white pants. If there is one day to look good, it’s against KSU. Saturday, KU failed to do even that.