While I think it’s cool to be in alternate uniforms, I understand the “establish the brand” moniker. We’ve been so poor with it throughout our history. Really poor. As I said in another thread, if we were to wear Dino throwbacks tonight, half the country wouldn’t even realize it was anything different. That’s a problem. Penn st has worn middle school practice uniforms for their entire history. But when they play people know it’s them.
I personally like the Marino era colors. That’s the Pitt I fell in love with. And I understand young students who like the Notre dame and Akron wannabe uniforms. But I embrace what we have now because it’s cool, it’s unique (essentially), it pops, and we should ride with it forever.
I think as long as the colors stay the same we're fine. Like if we wanted to wear white pants-blue jerseys-white helmets tonight, that's not somehow going to destroy our brand. Everything is so different now with social media, and I think some people (myself included, oftentimes) get caught up thinking about things the way they were 20 years ago. The ones that stay the same every single week almost seem pretentious to me nowadays.
And I don't see how anyone could pine for those Notre Dame/Navy/Akron/Georgia Tech/etc. colors. Those were hideous. It's actually kind of crazy that we're the only royal blue/gold uniforms in the P4 (aside from like Cal throwbacks, etc.). It's not that uncommon of a combination.
I have pointed this out many times, but there was a weird obsession in like the 90s/early 2000s where so many teams that were royal blue switched to navy. Pitt, Milwaukee Brewers, Buffalo Bills, Los Angeles Rams, Denver Broncos, New England Patriots, Seattle Seahawks, Seattle Mariners... I think the Buffalo Sabres before they went to black and maybe some other NHL teams, etc. Then you had the Chargers and Tennessee Titans who both switched to navy from other shades of blue. Like I don't know if Steve Pederson came up with that all by himself; it almost seems like there was some type of study or something. That was kind of "a thing" around that time.
I used to want to mustard with the darker blue, but I've kind of done a 180 on that. Those helmets are freaking ugly (my opinion). Like here is a good shot of how gold they're not:
The helmets are actually pretty darn close to what we wore until 2019. I much prefer the stickers on it the the helmet itself.
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