Sunday Morning Uni Watch

By Phil Hecken, with Terry Duroncelet

As the college “regular” season winds down, and the Conference Championships and other smaller games kick in, we get a much smaller pool of uni watching games. But there were still a bunch of good ones for week 14 of the NCAA schedule. I’m sure Terry will have more on this below, but one of the better games (although not the most aesthetically appealing), was the inaugural B1G championship game, pitting Wisconsin against Michigan State, for the right to rep the B1G in the Rose Bowl. Lots of hard-hitting ensued, including one incredible shot on Keshawn Martin, by Wisconsin’s Chris Borland, resulting in Martin losing both his helmet AND his do rag. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that before.

Anyway…for the full rundown, here’s Terry:

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Not a lot of uni-action for this college football weekend, but there were some things of note:

• In the inaugural Pac 12 Championship game on Friday, #7 for UCLA wore what might be the worst-looking biker shorts in the history of college football… ever. Soccer sliders, football briefs, G.B.S. (Gridiron Boy Shorts), and many more names come to mind when I look at this picture, and is very reminiscent of Michael Crabtree’s stunt from Thanksgiving. How did he even get away with that? I’m pretty sure that the NCAA made it clear that you are still required to wear knee pads, even though they said that you are no longer required to wear your pants below your knees (as of 2010). I hope that someone with higher powers of authority than me comes down on #7 hard, not because his padded briefs look like crap, but more importantly, it’s a serious safety risk to him, his opponents, and his teammates. I pray that it doesn’t take a promising dude with NFL-status who could forever change the way the game is played for the better suffering a career-ending knee injury because he’s stuck in that phooey mindset that lower-leg pads will slow you down for the NCAA (and hopefully, the NFL. Monkey see, monkey do.) to realize that the players’ safety is more important than having the fastest :40 time on a big play. Now that I got that ALL-CAPS RAGE out of me, let’s move on to other things from that game The Pac 12 Championship caps were -of course — snapbacks, green underbrim included. Tough to see in this photo, but some of UCLA’s nose bumpers had the American flag on them. Have they been there all season? And Chip Kelly said something along the lines of… “”¦And we’re gonna go drink some Dr. Pepper, and mail our Christmas presents with UPS!” during his postgame speech to the crowd. I’ll leave it at that.

• Wyoming wore (in my opinion) their least-offensive combo yesterday in the Border War against Colorado State. The Cowboys had a helmet decal with the pattern of the Wyoming State flag. Here’s a closer view, and more info here. Ugly, yes, but considering that we live in an age where uniform vendors have the ability to dress their customers in full State flag gear from head-to-toe (I’m not gonna say any names, but you should be able to figure out who I’m talking about), this could’ve been worse (with thanks to Jim Vilk for those first two pics).

• Oklahoma State wore their orange jerseys for only the second time this season against State rival Oklahoma. Good-looking game, overall.

• Speaking of dark lids/orange jerseys/dark pants uniform combos, Boise State wore blue helmets, orange jerseys, and blue pants on the blue turf yesterday. Would’ve been perfect had it not been for the file tabs.

• TCU wore their Nike Pro Combat helmets from 2010, but with different helmet decals and no helmet stripe.

• Kansas State, a team that normally wears white sleeves and socks, went with black sleeves and socks against Iowa State. Kind of looks out of place and depressing.

• In the inaugural B1G Championship game, Michigan State’s Keshawn Martin took a big hit that not only knocked his helmet off, but his do-rag went flying, too. Here’s video on the hit.

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Thanks Terry! Smashing job, as always, even if the uni action was a little thin this weekend.

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Colorize This!

Occasionally, I will be featuring wonderful, high-quality black and white photographs that are just begging to be colorized.

In what may be a first in a long time, there are no colorizations from Mr. Chilvers (hope you’re enjoying your holiday, sir), but we have a whole set from a new-to-UW tweaker, who’ll be the first up today. Now, in a couple of these, he’s got some “in progress” stages, and he’ll be asking some of the more advanced colorizers for their tips. Folks, you know what to do.

Allow me to introduce Ryan Dowgin, who sent me four separate colorization e-mails:

Hey Phil,

I recently started trying out colorization. The pic I chose to start with is of the Colgate football team from sometime between 1929 and 1931. Apparently I picked a really tough photo for my first try, but I am having fun with it and I think it is going pretty well so far. I have done the jerseys, the pants, the football, and the grass, the coaches shirt and tie. All of that took about 3 hours worth of work. I am really dreading having to do the trees, any tips for getting them done easily? (Step One, Two, Three, Four.)

thanks,
Ryan

Now, you don’t think Ryan would leave that photo unfinished, do you? Of course not. Here’s the second e-mail:

Hey Phil,

Here is the finished product of the first colorization I sent you on Saturday. Took around 8 hours of working time.

I have also included my second attempt (a much easier photo) that only took me about an hour and a half.

Not finished, Ryan sent me a third e-mail:

Here is one more for good measure. The subject is Belf West at Colgate practice from around 1916.

And finally, in an e-mail entitled “hooked on colorization,” Ryan offered his fourth submission:

Officially hooked on this stuff. Here is a rare B+W shot of the old, old scoreboard at Whitnall Field at Colgate University and my colorization of it. I still have not gotten doing the trees down, but I think it came out okay.

Great stuff, Ryan. Welcome to the wonderful world of colorization! OK, experts, got any tips for Ryan?

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Next up, the big dogs. We’ll start with Gary Chanko, who took on a couple challenges from last weekend. Here’s Gary:

Phil,

Last week’s Sunday Morning Uni Watch provided a few project suggestions, including this one from reader Kevin Feser (I love this picture). The image quality did present challenges for colorization – exposure issues resulting in high contrast, some loss of detail (posterization) from scanning the original, and a totally blown out sky. All of these make colorizing difficult to achieve great results.

But the real challenges were getting the uni color correct. Fortunately other readers pointed to a few research links that helped lead to what I believe is a correct outcome. When I initially looked at the B&W photo the jersey stood out as something other than white. For BYU you might normally expect traditional blue and white. But for the 1940 season the color scheme was orange, blue and white as one of the research links discussed.

The helmet colors were another mystery. The photo original clearly shows a tone difference between the bottom portion and the top straps. If you examine this photo the different color scheme is more apparent. So it likely was orange, blue, and white for the helmet.

The remaining uni uncertainty are the leather knee pads. They might well have been orange also, but I choose a simple brown leather patch.

To complete the colorization I decided to do something about the sky area that was going to look washed out (white) if colorized. I simply replaced it with something more suitable.

Now on to the real discovery related to this colorization project. I’ve spent this college football season believing some whacked-out Under Armour designer created the uni disaster in Maryland. However, it is now revealed the University of Maryland is actually the spawn of BYU ’40.

Now I’m on to that Shorpy photo.

Gary

Magnifique! Not surprisingly, I received another submission from Gary. Betcha can’t guess what it was:

Phil,

Another great football photo project from last Sunday’s Uni Watch (incredible shot on Shorpy).

A Shorpy reader identified the players as members of the 1940 Minot High Magicians and luckily knew the school colors of maroon and gold. I cropped the original a bit to improve the composition.

Gary

Fantastic on that one as well, Gary.

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Finally, we have B. Smile, who took on Babe Ruth, but not the one from last weekend:

Phil,

I was thinking about doing a colorization of that 1923 Babe Ruth in a NY Giants uni pic, but I decided to finish one that I was already working on:

Babe in a Brooklyn Dodgers uni from 1938 taken at Braves Field, Boston.

The original came from the Boston Public Library Flickr page here.

I decided against a full-color attempt at the ballpark/stands (way too labor intensive), so I made that part sepia, which I think makes Babe stand out even more.

If you run it in the Colorize This! section, please give the credit to “BSmile” because then I’ll post it at Baseball-Fever (where I posted a sepia-only version on Nov.21) and on my blog.

Cheers!
~B

Great job B!

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Another fantastic job by all the colorizers (and welcome aboard Ryan). If you have a B&W you think would make for a good colorization, or have anything you want to send in, give me a shout. Beginners, intermediates, advanced & experts are all welcome.

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Uni Tweaks Concepts

We have another new set of tweaks, er…concepts today. After discussion with a number of readers, it’s probably more apropos to call most of the reader submissions “concepts” rather than tweaks. So that’s that.

So if you’ve concept for any sport, or just a tweak or wholesale revision, send them my way.

Please do try to keep your descriptions to ~50 words (give or take) per image — if you have three uniform concepts in one image, then obviously, you can go a little over, but no novels, OK? OK!. You guys have usually been good with keeping the descriptions pretty short, and I thank you for that.

And so, lets begin:

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We start with Marc Gilbert. Geez, the ink’s not even dry on the paper and their unis are barely three weeks old, but already you guys are “tweak”ing the Marlins:

Phil, I think the Marlins need an update already. Having 3 primary colors, plus silver black and white is just too much–even for funky South Florida.

The main design isn’t bad, but could be improved with just a little addition-by-subtraction.

–Marc Gilbert

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Next up is William Yurasko, who has 3 sets of concepts, and nicely avoids going over 50 words per by linking to his own blog:

Phil

I have been meaning to send along my Eagles update for a while and then I saw the one today. Here’s what I did.

I also did some Wizards (a very popular post on my blog, I came close to the new logo) and Capitals (Capitals capitalized, more red) mockups a while back that I have been meaning to send you.

Let me know if you have any questions.

Cheers!

– William

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And closing out the concepts today is Hyatt Werling, whose submission I may have missed earlier this summer:

Dear Phil,

[I submitted these a long time ago, before Uni Tweaks went on hiatus for the summer. I’m guessing they got lost in the shuffle during that time.]

My name’s Hiatt Werling, with four more tweaks that follow the theme of changing an NFL team’s color scheme based on something that I can in some way relate to the team or the city. I’d like to made such a tweak for all 32 teams. As a disclaimer, obviously I don’t think any team should ever use any of these, they’re just for fun and to see what I can come up with. Here are the last four. I’d like to thank Uni Watch for putting up with my goofy bullshit for eight weeks.

Vikings – North Stars Set: I figured the Vikings could resurrect the Minnesota North Stars’ colors, complete with a combination of the Vikings and North Stars logos on the helmet.

Packers – Milwaukee Set: The Packers are just about the only team to not play in a metropolitan area of any real size. Of course they should never leave Green Bay, but they could still claim the metropolitan area of Milwaukee by adopting some Milwaukee colors. And so I gave them the blue from the Brewers (the glove logo era blue) and the red from the Bucks. For the throwback, I switched and used the gold from the Brewers and the green from the Bucks (which coincidentally are essentially the Packers’ current colors), and for fun I tried combining the Packers logo and the Brewers glove logo.

Giants – Big Apple Set: Nothing much to say here, New York City is called The Big Apple and I thought it would be fun to put an apple on the Giants’ jersey. I used the Washington Apple logo as the base.

Bears – Bubble Gum Set: I tweaked the Bears last as I had the hardest time coming up with something for them. Previously, I had wanted to see what a team would look like with bubble gum colors on their jerseys, pink and bubble gum blue, and then I made the connection between Chicago, Wrigley Field, and gum, and that was good enough for me.

–Hyatt

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OK, that’s it for this weekend. Back with more concepts/tweaks next weekend.

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Benchies

by Rick Pearson

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Following yonder LED…

And of course, the full-size.

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BCS Predictions

Time for my annual BCS prognostications — I’ve been pretty spot on with these in the past, but this year we got a whole mess of monkey wrenches thrown into the works — including Houston’s absolute tanking against Southern Miss yesterday. I don’t know about you, but apparently this was quite a shocker to Case Keenum. The good thing is, a probably very underserving (but hitherto undefeated) Cougar team won’t be getting their asses handed to them on a platter facing LSU in the Big Dance. So, with them out of the picture, let’s see what I think we will have:

Orange Bowl: I have to think we’ll be seeing Clemson (who nicely tucked away Va Tech yesterday) matching up against the lesser of all evils West Virginia. Could the Big Least be any worse this year?

Sugar Bowl: Another crapshoot, but I’d have to guess the B1G will get Michigan (over say, Michigan State) in an at-large against a purple and black team. Will that be TCU or Kansas State? Tough call, but I’ll go with Texas Christian.

Fiesta Bowl: This one’s an easier call (I think) — Oklahoma State will rep the Big 12 (it’s doubtful they’ll move up to #2 and overtake Alabama) against Pac12 runner-up (kinda) Stanford…er, Stanford.

Rose Bowl: This one’s easy. It’s always your Pac12 (still wrapping my head around that one) champ, so that would be Oregon against the B1G champ, which would be Wisconsin. Except when the Pac12 or B1G champ is ranked #1 or #2…then they take another team. And it’s always played on New Year’s Day. Except when New Year’s Day is a Sunday. Then they play it on January 2. So, yeah.

BCS Championship Bowl: Obviously, LSU will be there. And, unless something really funky happens with the rankings, they’ll be engaging in a rematch with Alabama. At least we can be sure this will be Jim Vilk’s #1 good game in the post-season 5&1.

So whattya think? Am I gonna be right or wrong?

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Jim Vilk’s 5 & 1

And now for the part of the post that I wait up all night for you’ve all been waiting for…

And Jimmer got me this pretty early last evening, since he didn’t need to delve through 766 games — I think there were like eight on the schedule or something…so that means, with the honorable mentions, we’ll probably get all eight somewhere below.

I KID…there were more than eight games, but only about 5 of them were really important.

Here’s Jim:

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Honorable Mentions to Wyoming/Colorado State – You know, if the Cowboys would have worn their regular logos, they finally could have made the big time.

And to Middle Tennessee/North Texas – Yeah, both of these matchups have mono green, but they’re not the same shade as the turf.

5. Iowa State/Kansas State – It took a slow week, but the Cyclones are finally back.

4. Syracuse/Pitt – After screwing up one of my favorite hoops conferences, the least you can do is put on a nice-looking football game.

3. Oklahoma/Oklahoma State – Probably should have included the Cowboys before, but better late than never.

2. Virginia Tech/Clemson – Soooo close to perfection…

1. Georgia/LSU – Those colors can sure brighten up a dome game, eh?

And the bad one: UConn/Cincinnati – These schools look much better indoors.

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Alrighty then. I won’t argue with your #1, because it was clearly the best, but damn if Clemson/Va Tech wasn’t almost a co-winner. What exactly was “so close” anyway? Va Tech looked about as good as they can ever look, and that is absolutely Clemson’s best look. And I’d have even allowed for that Wyoming game (seeing as how you were Jonesing to get them into the top five forever, since they went color-on-color)…maybe next year.

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That’ll do it for this first Sunday in December. I want to give a HUGE and HEARTFELT thanks to Jim Vilk, Terry Duroncelet and Rick Pearson for their tremendous work this fall season. But their work isn’t done — Jim will have plenty of 5&1’s as we move into the “post” season (and some look backs at this year), Rick will have a bunch more “50 Years Ago” and Terry will take us through the Bowls. But still, a big, fat STANDING “O” is in order for all three — take a bow gentlemen, you deserve it.

Everyone have a wonderful Sunday and I’ll catch you next weekend — there might be a little something on the Army-Navy game…if you catch my drift.

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“Ya ever go fishing, and get your lure buried in the muck on the bottom of the lake? You wrench it up, and it’s all gnarled up with rotting vegetation; nasty, stinky, slimy green and black detritus with a few chlorophyll-starved yellow bits. Yeah, that’s what Oregon looked like last night.” — “unionjack”