s much as we love Cal football and enjoy it, we must as always gripe gripe gripe (and don't worry, you haven't seen the last of drunken Cal fan!). I do have a complaint to register, and it has nothing do with football. It has to do with fashion.
Masculinity dropping...dropping...
Once upon a time, the Buffalo Bills had the most beautiful color scheme in all of football. Red, white and blue. I have no idea why the hell they decided to mess with this scheme, but five years ago they moved from these beauties...
To these monstrosities.
via www.emqb.com
If this wasn't a subtle gesture that the Bills are being moved to Canada with these dry maple leaf postmodern themes present here, I don't know what is.
Well, the Cal Golden Bears are headed this way, for better or for worse. It started in 2006 when we debuted those garish gold uniforms for primetime games, as if somehow we mysteriously played better wearing gold. It had nothing to do with the players on the field stepping up for these big night games, it was clearly the jerseys that pushed us over the edge!
Then we started sporting new jerseys this year that looked so close to the Michigan schemes, you'd swear we debuted them only to confuse the Spartans as to who they were playing. Nothing wrong with them from a seminal standpoint, but it just seemed like a marketing thing, to sell as many variations of our jerseys as possible. There didn't seem to be anything wrong with the old duds, why ruin a good thing?
One may ask, "WHY SO MANY DAMNED JERSEYS ARRRGH THIS IS ANNOYING." One word: Teen douchnozzles.
Teen douchenozzles, happy to hop on the Tedford bandwagon and sport all things Cal who are the real culprits. They will desperately hit on girls at their high school party sporting their Pain Train jerseys, being like "OH F LOOK AT ME." This will leave said girl to reflect "Wow, I'm never going to Cal" and deprive nerdy undergrads of one less female. Then they'll end up at Sac State and further poison our reputation by their Painful Train antics. Thanks a lot, teen douchenozzle.
This is not a teen douchenozzle.
I guess the question is whether you like the bells and whistles as a sideshow to the game. Although I despise SC for many things, I have to appreciate the fact that they play in pretty much two uniforms and keep things simple without all the bells and whistles of alternate uniforms. Of course this is the same reason I want to take a sledgehammer to the SC band for playing their fight song on every single play. They are steeped in tradition, not bothered by trivialities like time or circumstance.
But perhaps as Golden Bear fans, we should be prepared to hold ourselves to a new vision of prosperity, where gold and blue uniforms can stand on equal footing with blue and white and gold and white. Where we can always find new and equally shocking ways to surprise our fanbase in our dress attire. Where we can embrace change and realize that this evolution of jerseys is only naturally thematic to the evolution of man. Perhaps this is the allegory Tedford is trying to spread for us.
Or perhaps he's just embracing us for the day when we're wearing these helmets.
After the jump, decide which uniforms you like the least!
Jersey A: Gold jerseys, blue pants.
Jersey B: White jerseys and pants.
Jersey C: White jerseys and gold pants
Jersey D: Blue jerseys and pants.
Jersey E: Blue jerseys and white pants.
Rank the five jersey schemes you've seen so far from favorite to least favorite.
Note: Actually, I guess it's seven, we're probably going back to traditional white and blue for Arizona and we'll see blue and gold sometime this year--you can guess what they'll look like from the photos above. Rank them if you think it's fitting.