Oregon’s Grey Pants Return for Orange Bowl, Baggage Included

The Oregon Ducks are reaching a little deeper into the closet for their biggest game of the season.

For the first time in 2025, Oregon will wear grey pants when it takes the field for the College Football Playoff quarterfinal at the Orange Bowl against Texas Tech on Thursday. The uniform features black helmets with silver wings, white jerseys, and grey pants, marking the program’s first appearance in that colour combination this season. Notably, there’s no green, no yellow.

Strongest as one.@CFBPlayoff Quarterfinals uniform combo for @OregonFootball. #GoDucks pic.twitter.com/eDoU7PCZMo
— GoDucks (@GoDucks) December 24, 2025

For longtime Oregon fans, grey pants on the national stage come with quite a bit of baggage.

Grey became a prominent secondary colour during the late 2000s and early 2010s, a period which coincided with some of the most significant games in team history (as well as some of its most painful losses). Oregon wore grey pants in the 2011 BCS National Championship Game against Auburn, the 2012 overtime loss to Stanford, and again in the 2015 CFP National Championship against Ohio State.

Fairly or not, those games have cemented grey pants as part of Oregon’s postseason visual memory, making their reappearance now, after going unused all season, a curious choice. Not to mention, it’s a sharp and sudden deviation from the visual identity Oregon has built throughout the year (which, to be fair, IS the visual identity at Oregon).

*Game results, left to right: Loss, Loss, Loss, TBD.*

The reaction from Ducks fans was split between welcoming a clean, simple look for the traditionally overdesigned Nike-sandbox of a club. In contrast, others voiced frustration at the school once again moving away from its classic green and yellow colour scheme for a game with so many people watching. On Reddit, one fan summed up a common sentiment by writing, “Low key, the old person in me wants some green and yellow on the national stage, so I am disappointed,” while another added, “Honestly, really tired of the black/white especially on the road this year.”

The grey pants, predictably, drew the most attention. One commenter described the look, referring to their 2015 loss to Ohio State, as giving “2015 Natty vibes,” while another put it more bluntly: “Grey pants? Ducks have a long history of losing in grey pants.” Others pushed back on the entire premise, with one fan replying, “Say it with me. Uni colour doesn’t determine the outcome of the game.”

Holiday heat. @CFBPlayoff First Round uniform combo for @OregonFootball. #GoDucks pic.twitter.com/FcWBbbRLbT
— GoDucks (@GoDucks) December 18, 2025

The Ducks traditionally wear green and yellow, as they did earlier this month for their first-round playoff game

Uniforms don’t decide games, but they do accumulate meaning over time, especially at a program like Oregon, where visual identity has been central for more than two decades. Grey pants aren’t new, and they aren’t rare, but their reappearance in a College Football Playoff game inevitably resurfaces some of these less-than-ideal moments and can get into everyone’s head (of course, if they win the Orange Bowl, then everyone will forget any of this ever happened). Whether this set becomes truly “cursed” in the eyes of fans or finally exorcises some of its duck-billed demons will have to wait to be decided on the field, this Thursday, New Year’s Day at noon ET, 9 am PT.