Is The NCAA Trying To Control The College Football Uniform Craze?

We’ve talked multiple times about how college football uniforms are basically the Wild Wild West of the sports logos/uniforms world. You’ve got schools who now pride themselves on wearing a different uniform every week, other schools who are willing to drop school colors in the name of looking cool, schools who wear jerseys with names and numbers that are extremely difficult to read from a distance, and then you have Oregon who does all three of those things at once. It’s a wacky world out there for college football uniforms. However, the NCAA may be looking to reign in some of that action pretty soon. According to Jon Solomon of CBS Sports, the NCAA may be looking to adopt a “centralized process” to approve any new uniforms that come down the pike. From the article:

The idea isn’t to stop Oregon, or any school, from wearing a different uniform each week. It’s to literally be able to read the jersey numbers from the press box.
“It just needs to be within the scope of the rules and have contrast in the numbers,” Shaw said. “What’s contrast? Sometimes it’s in the eye of the beholder.”

So, this appears to be focused on problem #3 listed above, which is the most important problem from a functionality standpoint. The main purpose of a uniform is to distinguish one player from another, and that becomes a pretty difficult job when you can’t make out the numbers on a uniform from a distance, and it also causes problems for those who want to see names on the back as well, which is pretty important if you want to get your name in the papers (or webpages, if we want to stay hip with the times, here).

Would this new process keep teams from coming out with as many wacky-looking uniforms as they like in order to sway recruits to come to their schools solely because of their uniform taste? Probably not, but it would at least make sure that the designers keep the essentials in mind when they set out to come up with the next crazy look, and it’d also give the schools something to think about as they approve the unis for their players to wear.