Football Fashion

In honor of it being a college football gameday, I thought we'd take a look at some interesting football uniform fashions. Actually I just wanted to raise a point about form meeting function and someone's design fail. Last week Ohio State hit the field in their "retro" uniforms, the Nike Pro Champion series, a vintage inspired look to pay tribute to the 1961 Championship team (see, even football gets into vintage fashion). The look is shown below:

Via FuckYeahBuckeyes

And that was all well and good but it reminded me of last year's retro uniforms and the glove debacle that ensued. Nike again designed retro uniforms for the Buckeyes, shown below, that were a send-up to the 1942 team uniforms, complete with gloves that were, and I cannot stress this enough, specifically designed to make the Block O when a player put his hands together.

They really looked unspeakably cool. And yet, after a touchdown, OSU was slapped with unsportsmanlike conduct penalties for throwing up the Block O that the gloves were made for. Now, it seems to me that someone, somewhere (Nike design room, NCAA officials, whoever is in charge of uniform regulations, hell, even the referees) maybe possibly should have been on top of this before it became an issue. If that was such a no-no I suspect Nike wouldn't be designing gloves with such a purpose in the first place. Such an innocuous (and rather ingenious) little design detail that created such a large amount of controversy. Design fail/win/backfire. Let this be a lesson in never overlooking the importance of design.