Our Honor Defend

I had this idea for a post over a year ago, but it got lost in the shuffle of recruiting news and other things of interest.  This time last year had Buckeye fans asking for significant changes to the way Ohio State football operates.  Debates raged about several things.  Many of us were debating whether Jim Bollman should be fired as both offensive line coach and as offensive coordinator.  We asked if Jim Tressel should be much more hands-off with the nature of the offense, allowing a new voice to breathe some life into a stagnant offensive approach.  We asked if the Buckeyes should alter their approach to recruiting, affording greater emphasis to higher-level recruits even if they were well outside the recruiting sanctuaries of Ohio and western Pennsylvania.

In short, anxiety over disastrous season finales had led us to debate things of significant importance to the future of the program and were, for all intents and purposes, topics well outside the expertise of any one Buckeye fan.  That is not to say they weren’t, and aren’t, important debates to have, but the changes proposed were large in scope.  The thought I had was to significantly reduce things we would want to change about the program, viz, the particulars that no one could care really care about given the enormity of other things discussed.

Of course, truly obsessive fans — like Buckeye fans — care about the particulars.  There has always been some things about Buckeye football I would love to see changed for my own amusement.  I present these below.

01. Change everything about the end zone

Ohio State changed from grass back to the synthetic turf after the 2006 season, right as it became apparent that Ohio Stadium grass aged like milk over the course of a season.  My first preference was to keep the grass because, under the right circumstances, no other lawn in the world glows as radiantly.  Nevertheless, the change to turf was necessary.  The change to the end zone artwork that followed was not necessary.

I think Michigan Stadium changed to turf a few years ago, but kept the essence of the end zone decoration.  The only paint was in the letters.  Two programs aimed at each other’s total humiliation in late November had that minor detail in common, but Ohio State opted for the change with the installation of turf.  The result is kind of ugly, I think.  If I had to guess, I think they wanted a more “modern” take on the end zone art of the 1980s.  The font is basically the same, but, this time around, the font is white (with black trim) and the end zone is scarlet.  Pictures are hard to reproduce to show this, but you can watch any of my Earle Bruce-era clips on the YouTubes to see this (example).  This coincides with the changes to the uniforms in 2006, again to a very Bruce-era-ish design.

The problem I have with it is that too many programs, especially in the Big Ten, have a hue of red as their primary color and so many of those have glaring red end zones as well.  For a program that stands out in a tradition-laden conference, the end zone we chose to adopt is awfully pedestrian and hard to dissociate from those at Camp Randall and Memorial Stadium in Indiana.  Further, the typeface for “Ohio State” and “Buckeyes” is uuuuugly.  I envision Ohio State as a mostly block font program, a typeface synonymous with rich tradition.  The typeface in the end zone looks like something a 12 year old kid does to a Word document, hoping that the transition from Times New Roman to Arial or Verdana will help him pad the required page length for a middle school book report on Johnny Tremaine, or whatever kids those ages read.  To be fair, it is in many ways similar to what we had before the switch.  However, the typeface is significantly tinier.  It just looks puny.

I’d love a total overhaul and, if should the end zone feature a painted background, I would love for it to be gray.  Previous Rose Bowl games including Ohio State did a much better job incorporating gray into the Ohio State’s end zone.  I would love if Ohio State just stole one of those designs and essentially replicated it for Ohio Stadium.  I’m not against Ohio State exploring the old diamond pattern it used to have through the 1960s.

02. Adjust the Buckeye stripe on the pants

The famed Buckeye stripe on the pants has a rather long history and it appears to me that changes to the stripe on the pants occur as some kind of random artifact of the process of making them year in and year out.  Compare these pictures of two teammates — Brian Baschnagel and Archie Griffin — to see how subtle the differences can be.  The design we have now appears to be the only thing that survived the transition from the late 1990s under Cooper and into the present.

My issue is that I love consistency in design.  We do not have it now.  I do not think we ever did have it under Woody Hayes, though, to be fair, those are definitively formative years in the construction of a football “image” as equipment continues to progress.  What some people forget is that there was actually a time we did have it: under Earle Bruce.  The Buckeyes got a new look, essentially the look it re-adopted in 2006, shortly after Earle Bruce arrived on campus to coach the Buckeyes.  One noticeable change was eliminating the thick black Buckeye stripe on the pants (what it re-adopted in turn as soon as Cooper took the Buckeye job) and replacing it with something that perfectly matched the helmet stripe.  This picture of Art Schlichter shows what I’m talking about.  A lot of the changes we made in 2006/07 were throwbacks to the Earle Bruce era, that is, the 1980s.  This coincides with every generation’s fascination with the period twenty years before it.  Surprisingly, this change was not made.   I’m hoping it eventually will be.

03. Get a consistent “gray”

I think I’m exercising my inner art historian here.  Again, I love consistency in a uniform set, and it’s something we lack at the moment.  One thing that frustrates the purist in me is the development of “gray” in recent years.  I put “gray” in quotes for the sake of this exercise because we seem to have multiple shades of the color.

This has become more pronounced with the uniform changes of 2006.  I was opposed to idea initially.  It became public when I was still a student at The Ohio State University and I was not a fan of the idea.  I relented once I looked back through the years and reminded myself that these were Bruce-era uniforms.  However, the change of the home jersey to feature no gray whatsoever has underscored just how not-gray the pants have become.  I do not get to see what the uniforms look like up close and personal, so I can not verify this.  However, the pants look more and more like a neutral color that you would while looking for a bucket of Behr for the living room paint job.  It lacks the “gray” that I think we all think of when we think of the school colors.  The only time when there appears to be some kind of consistency is under the lights.

This development also occurs with the change to the silver helmets in the Cooper era.  I can not give an exact year for the change to a metallic silver sheen on the helmets, but its change has been welcome among Buckeye fans.  Because of it, and some kick-ass defenses we had under Fred Pagac, we now have the metaphor of the “Silver Bullets” ingrained in Buckeye lore.  But this in turn adds to an inconsistent “gray” we currently have. With no gray to orient the home jerseys with the helmet and the pants, the differences are glaring to me.

To compensate, I would love for the Buckeyes to return to the silver-ish pants we had in 1998.  Every now and then you will read a rival fan making fun of our gray helmets being silver.  However, if there’s consistency in the “gray” that we have on the uniforms, then there is really nothing patently wrong.  Our Buckeye “gray” is a silver, and that’s that.

04. Significantly downplay the use of black

The recent changes to the overall aesthetic presentation of Ohio State football has come with something that I think as more deleterious the more I think about it.  Black has become a more obvious feature of the overall Ohio State color palette.  The end zone letters now have a black trim, and I think it’s fairly prominent.  The home jerseys, absent any gray, now rely on the black color of the jersey stripe for a frame.  Worse yet, I fear this is leading to future jersey changes which may have a black trim bordering the numbers.  Our version of red is dark enough to where a black border is unncecessary and, in my opinion, a little ugly.  This was my biggest complaint about those “retro” jerseys we had for the Michigan game last year.

The problem I have with black becoming a more prominent feature of the Buckeye color palette is that it is not a quality secondary color.  Our primary colors are scarlet, gray and white, the last of which is necessary for road jerseys.  Black is just too strong a color to not be distracting and its increasing use seems to coincide with the decline of gray in other facets (the color of the old endzone font, the trim on the home jersey sleeves, etc).

To that end, I’d like to see us limit black to the Buckeye stripe and the cleats.  I already want us to redo the end zone, but there are other things I’d like.  I hate seeing the black socks (see Sanzenbacher above). The knee high whites are used for colder weather games, but it is usually ankle high black socks any other time.  I’d love to do what Boston College did a few years ago: emulate the pros and wear stockings.  However, my preference for this is strictly cosmetic and I am certain most people who have to wear them complain that they can be cumbersome.  I seem to recall some game in the late 1980s, or early 1990s, where Ohio State had white socks with a red trim.

I’d like to bring back an incarnation of the previous home jerseys.  A poll I ran about a year ago on whether people preferred the previous uniform set (Cooper era, first half of Tressel era) to the current uniform set (Bruce era, second half of Tressel era) was fairly divided.  An interesting compromise may be keeping the road uniform as is and bringing back the previous home jerseys.  I genuinely like the new road uniform.  I always felt that Ohio State is in its element in the road whites, unlike programs like Michigan and Tennessee that emphasize their home jerseys.  The nouveau Bruce look is sleeker (not necessarily better).  The home jerseys are difficult to distinguish from Nebraska or Wisconsin.  If I had to guess, I think those changes occurred because newer jerseys advances from Nike have almost eliminated any sleeves.  Still, I think there’s something that can be done.  No other program that I can think of openly embraces gray like Ohio State nominally does.  Sometimes I wonder if we are retreating from it when we should be embracing it.

This is all just navel-gazing during the offseason, but it can be a fun discussion.  It may have even brought back you reactions to the jersey changes, the stadium turf and the retro jerseys to the fore.  Share if interested.