Nike’s Football Department is Lazy
September 18th, 2008 at 11:17 amBy Chris
With a plethora of schools under their sponsorship net, Nike’s uniforms are easily recognizable, mainly because of the swoosh. However, it’s becoming painfully obvious Nike’s football uniform design department isn’t afraid to use the same design for different schools. Just ask the Universities of Buffalo and Kentucky.
Now, both teams use a shade of blue as their primary school color, so there will be some similarities. But is it necessary to use almost exactly the same design for each team?
Buffalo
Kentucky
Besides the shades of blue being a little different and Kentucky’s side stripes, the uniforms look exactly alike and that’s pretty poor. I don’t know about you, but if I was a responsible for designing uniforms for teams I sponsor, I’d try my best to make each uniform look as unique and individual to the school as possible.
Take Duke and North Carolina for instance. These are also Nike schools and in Duke’s case, they use a color scheme almost identical to Kentucky’s. Oddly enough, however, the uniforms don’t look anything alike. The designs are different enough to differentiate with a simple glance.
Not so with Buffalo and Kentucky — something I’m a year late getting to, obviously.
Understandably, neither school is prominent enough for Nike to completely reinvent their design methods, but then again, neither is Duke or North Carolina. Yet, somehow, Nike avoided repeating themselves with these schools. Duke doesn’t look like Kentucky even though they share the same color scheme and North Carolina’s design looks different from all the schools discussed in this post, as it should.
It would be nice if Nike would use different design schemes for all their schools altogether, but that’s probably too much to ask. I mean, there’s only so much Nike can do when it comes to designing football uniforms in a unique fashion.
Just ask the University of Oregon.
September 18th, 2008 at 1:47 pm
Trolls, Lisa Horne, The SEC, NASCAR, Isaac & Auto Accidents…
Some afternoon linkage from around the blogosphere I think you’ll enjoy.
Thomas is a Troll – and has the hots for Lisa (YMSWWC)
The SEC is Great – We Knew That of Course (Gate 21)
Rednecks Steal Engine From NASCAR Driver (Hugging Harold Reynolds…
September 19th, 2008 at 7:45 am
Nike re-uses most of their uniform designs, they just swap out the colors. I think the Buffalo/Kentucky one is the same Boise State uses and the Duke one looks identical to the one they use for Syracuse. You used to be able to mess with the templates on NikeiD, can’t find it now. That Kentucky/Buffalo similarity is just ridiculous, though.
September 19th, 2008 at 8:14 am
I mean, if they can make Duke’s unique, shouldn’t that be grounds for every uniform being unique? This is Duke football we are talking about.
September 19th, 2008 at 9:01 am
What’s “unique” about the Duke football uniform? It’s a ripoff of the Indianapolis Colts’ uniform.
September 19th, 2008 at 9:04 am
That’s true Clark, but they don’t look like other college uniforms — or at least like teams with similar colors. Doesn’t Reebok make the NFL jerseys? Maybe the Colts ripped off Duke.
September 19th, 2008 at 11:26 am
the fonts used are different, the design of the numbers are different, the piping is different… but yes, they both have solid blue uniforms. congrats on not being color blind. paul lukas is disgusted with you all.
September 19th, 2008 at 11:44 am
So this font:
is different from this one:
???
Hell, even their helmets are similar:
Far be it from me to ask for a little bit of effort on Nike’s part.
September 19th, 2008 at 12:58 pm
Many schools, especially smaller ones such as Buffalo do not have contracts with Nike regarding sponsorship and therefore do not have the ability to receive unique apparrell. While Duke and North Carolina might not have the most prestiguous football programs, their basketball programs desirability benefits the rest of their sports programs. As someone who played in a program with only a small sponsorship (albeit in a different sport) we were given a catalog and told to pick what we wanted (with options for different base uniforms and then screen print design). So while Nike is not producing unique uniforms for each program, more likely it is the school who chose to model their uniform after another school.
September 19th, 2008 at 1:05 pm
Thanks for the info Mitch. That makes a lot more sense.
September 19th, 2008 at 1:09 pm
kentucky has white on their ribs and chris nike doesnt come up with teams logos that is the schools doing
September 19th, 2008 at 1:16 pm
I understand UK and Buffalo designed their logo and now that Mitch explained some things, it’s understandable why the designs are so similar. The front part of each jersey, to me, looks awfully, awfully alike, font and all. But if Buffalo is ordering theirs from a preexisting design, that makes sense.
Same with the helmets.
Although, if I was Buffalo, I’d put my new mascot on my helmet to avoid any similarities. Plus, it looks better than the block letters.
October 2nd, 2008 at 1:31 pm
[...] to the Hyperdunks, I’ve questioned Nike’s designs before, but I must say, I do like the looks of these shoes. Currently, there are Hyperdunk images for [...]
October 3rd, 2008 at 2:24 pm
Hell, at least Nike did away with those dreaded one shoulder uniforms that Florida, Va Tech, and I think Miami wore in the early 00s. Those were terrible, but they met your unique category…so which would you rather have: generic or atrocious?
http://www.fanhouse.com/2007/0.....egon-edit/
February 20th, 2009 at 2:52 pm
I don’t usually comment, but great post
July 27th, 2009 at 9:21 pm
You do realize that the schools help design the jersies don’t you?
July 28th, 2009 at 8:21 am
So one of the schools is guilty of copying.