Dear Nike: Enough is Enough

Tonight I write to you from outside Park City, Utah, a town filled with BYU football fans.  Everywhere I look I've seen BYU shirts, car flags and license plate frames, with a few Utah Utes items sprinkled in.  Motivated by the college football spirit, I made sure to tune into ESPN tonight to check out the Labor Day battle between Boise State and Virginia Tech.  While I was hoping for some good football and an exciting, close game (the teams delivered on both), all I could focus on were how awful the uniforms were.

With the new Boise State uniforms, Nike definitely crossed the line.

Earlier this week, a loyal Caught Looking reader pointed me to this article about Nike's new Combat football line and uniforms, being worn this season by a number of schools including the Broncos and the Hokies.  As usual, Nike used a New York City-based fashion show to launch it's new duds and, also as usual, they're extremely ugly.  For a while, Nike only conducted their hideous experiments on the Phil Knight-dominated University of Oregon Ducks, but recently the Nike laboratory's reach has expanded across college football (and basketball, for that matter). 

The Boise State vs. Virginia Tech game displayed just how much damage Nike can inflict on college football uniforms.  The Rivals.com article does a good job of pointing out some of the true lowlights: namely the "ludicrously oversized Bronco logo on Boise State's alternative helmet and pants and the Tron-inspired design on Virginia Tech's numbers."  The one blue sleeve on the Broncos jerseys was also absurd, and I really disliked how Nike took the Hokies' classic maroon jerseys and turned them black.

I'm usually a big Nike fan; I often find myself buying their products, and think they've done a lot of good work in college sports.  But when Nike starts using college teams as vehicles to promote their new, "alternative" products, I say enough is enough.  Why can't we have more jerseys that look like those of the Oakland Raiders or New York Giants, and not something inspired by the inner components of a computer?