Oregon's Crazy-Ass Uniforms: An Investigation

"They're such beautiful shirts," she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. "It makes me sad because I've never seen such - such beautiful shirts before."--The Great Gatsby

When the University of Oregon Fighting Ducks hit the field turf of AT&T Stadium for today's National Championship, they'll be wearing brand-new jerseys, pants, and helmets--specifically, white jerseys, wolf gray pants, and white helmets bedazzled with silver duck wings.

None of those hues are Oregon's official colors of green and yellow, specifically and respectively Pantones 3425 and 108. Give Oregon a pass on white--everyone wears it. But why is Oregon taking the stage for the biggest moment in the history of their increasingly big-time football program wearing colors that aren't theirs? Because they're Oregon, and that's how they do things.

Brand-new uniforms are anything but novel for the Ducks. Their championship game get-up will make it nine different helmets, 10 distinct jerseys, and 10 pants styles over 15 games for Oregon. In a two-decade rise to power-program status, the old Pac-10 doormats became Pac-12 bullies, and stylish Nike uniforms have been the hallmark of the re-brand.

The Ducks' constant wardrobe changes, and occasional use of psychedelic neon, draw flak from traditionalists. Oregon's style is knocked as a showy bid for attention from arrivistes flush with sneaker cash but poor on tradition. The Ducks might be able to boast three top-five finishes in the past decade, but crazy uniforms never won a championship.

Oregon can silence such talk with a win on Monday. But whatever the result of the game, their emergence as a football powerhouse started with a Nike-powered (and -funded) visual re-branding. That evolution wasn't without moments of #disruptive doofishness. You might not care for green and gold, but Oregon has already won the war. We're all Oregon now.

Tim O'Brien, a frequent contributor to Uni Watch and general sports-uniform obsessive, runs the Duck Tracker blog, where he chronicles Oregon football's endless closet. He sees Oregon's as a matter of substance, and not just for the Ducks. "What Oregon has done over the last 10 to 15 years has significantly changed the aesthetics of college football. I'd say they've changed how people view aesthetics in almost all major sports," O'Brien told me. "You see more alternate jerseys, more color combinations, more teams, and more sports willing to take chances on bold design choices."

Oregon's visual flamboyance rhymes nicely with the offensive pyrotechnics of recent Ducks teams, but it has also resonated with uniform designers. The sleek, futuristic textures and vivid patterns of Ducks uniforms were the first HD football uniforms. Taking a look around at the livery of this bowl season, the Duck influence is impossible to deny. Oregon, and Nike, invented the look of modern football.

This is about more than shiny suits, though. In a 2011 Grantland piece, Michael Kruse convincingly links the Ducks' constant re-feathering to the "attention economy," the idea that enough eventually transmutes into substance. In Oregon's case, the high style of the Nike makeover caught the eye of recruits, and those recruits delivered substance in the form of wins.

But when does Oregon's sartorial splendor tip into plain old excess? You don't have to be a hidebound traditionalist to wonder if those one-off pink uniforms from October were less about beating cancer and more about boosting merch sales. A team really only needs two uniforms. A few alternates spice things up. But a different look for nearly every game starts to look like conspicuous consumption. As Kruse discovered in his 2011 visit to Eugene, looking ducky doesn't come cheap: the dark green paint used on that year's Oregon helmets ran $2,400 a gallon.

Of course, the Oregon football program is in no danger of going broke. Department of Education figures from the 2011-2012 season, compiled by Forbes, showed Oregon netting more than $31 million in just one year. The school could dress 100 players in Dior Homme tuxedos for each game and still make bank, even without Nike's patronage.

The fashion scholar Jennifer Craik has written that "the history of uniforms is the history of contemporary cultural preoccupations." Oregon football supports this idea--and not because we have a cultural preoccupation with eye-scorching neon or beefy dudes in the tightest possible pants. Oregon's uniforms may be futuristic, but they represent a pretty retro trend: money.

Oregon is not responsible for the nu-Gilded Age, but their deep closet is a telling symptom of its spread to sports. The school's imperial training facility embodies an excess so rococo that it would be funny only if it weren't true. The locker room is floored with rare hardwoods so dense that they don't burn. There are leather walls. It's a $68 million gym, just one part of a reputed $300 million in largesse from Phil Knight toward his alma mater's football program.

Let's not pick on Oregon. Their excess is far from unusual in the ranks of big-time sports, professional or amateur-themed. The Ducks' bold uniforms might set them apart from the competition, but as Andrew Sharp has written, Oregon is perhaps simply more transparent than other schools about the primacy of green and gold--and we're not talking about the school colors.

Read the baroque details in Nike's press release about the title game uniforms--replete with gonzo art featuring a winged Duck player and a generic Buckeye in a dracula cape. Hidden mantras are sewn into collars. Base layers no one will ever see bear a replica of Woody Hayes' chalkboard. Swoosh marks are embossed with something called Fractal Diamond patterns. The details and technical specs go on. Eventually you might ask whether you're reading about football uniforms or the vestments of some neo-Borgia cyberpope.

In the buildup to the big game, Oregon's crushed-out-heavenly look has disappointed uniform mavens looking for signature Ducks innovation. These uniforms are relatively quiet, maybe a tiny bit dignified. Tim O'Brien of Duck Tracker sees them as a missed opportunity for an image-conscious program. "It's a chance where you could win a national title, and if you do so, you're going to go down in history in whatever you wore. There will be paintings, videos, toasters. It's going to be an indelible part of one of these two school's histories, especially being the first playoff game."

Maybe that's how we know Oregon is one of the big boys now--they're dressing up in a monkey suit for the big meeting, just like the other execs.