Full Speed Ahead

By Phil Hecken

Once again, the Naval Academy proved it was the superior team, albeit just barely, over Army in the 113th edition of “America’s Game.” It was a squeaker, with Navy leading 17-13 and Army driving late in the 4th quarter…when Army fumbled and the Middies held on. It was the Cadets eleventh straight loss to Navy. So close.

Of course, on Uni Watch, the story isn’t about the Cadets atop Ranger 3 and Stryker, or holding a hoisting an effigy of the Veep (that’s the one on the right). In fact, Mr. Biden attended in POTUS’ stead and had the honor of the opening game coin toss. No. We’re all about the uniforms — and Nike once again created special unis for Army and Navy.

Instead of doing an extended recap of the game, though, I thought I’d turn to one of Uni Watch’s readers — who also happened to spend four years in the Navy — for his take on the A/N classic. So, today, I’m pleased to introduce to you Coleman W. Mullins — Navy vet, Mountaineer and Packers fan — who’ll give you his rundown of…

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America’s Game
By Coleman W. Mullins

In a move that will surely get him fired, and possibly sent for a CAT scan, Phil asked me if I would like to do a review of yesterday’s battle between Army and Navy.

See what I did there? Yeah, it’s okay to say it in this instance because these guys actually, you know, go to battle. But I digress. This game always means a lot to me for two main reasons. I served in the Navy, and more specifically, I served on board the USS Annapolis, which is of course home to these guys.

Oh look, a birdie!

Ok, on to America’s Game: Mono-black versus mono-white has never looked so good. For the 11th straight year, Navy defeated Army, and in doing so, regained the Commander in Chief’s Trophy. There isn’t much about these two uniforms that hasn’t already been covered here at UW, but it was great to finally see them in action. I’ll simply go through my observations of both sides. As is tradition, the losing team sings first.

Army looked pretty darn sharp. The Battle of the Bulge theme looked pretty nice here, but not so much here. Minute details like that just don’t show up too well on a tv screen. One thing a really liked was the number treatment. I always enjoy seeing Army use their stencil font, and I personally had no trouble reading it, Stealth Font or not. One thing I am not a fan of is the gold that Army used for this uni, or more specifically, the helmet. I understand it’s a special uniform, but that color just didn’t say Army to me.

Now, for the victors! Navy went mono-white and looked wonderful. That shot shows something I didn’t even notice before the game. Those stripes going down the shoulder seem to imitate the shoulder boards of a Midshipman uniform. Very cool. I also enjoyed the font Navy used. Now about that helmet. What could have been a great looking piece was lessened by all this. I guess the flags spelling out “BEAT ARMY” are sort of cool, but when you add that to a uni number, the First Navy Jack, and a “get well” sticker in that small amount of space, it’s bound to look terrible. As Ricko pointed out last night in the comments, and I tend to agree, the helmet certainly brings to mind the Midshipmen’s cover, or “hat” in civilian speak.

That about does it for my first official write-up, please be gentle!

Oh, I also found this gem while looking up all these pictures that I simply couldn’t leave out. GO NAVY!

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Coleman W. Mullins was born and raised a Mountaineer fan (and hates the GFGS unis they broke out this year), bleeds Packer Gold & Green, served in the Navy for four years, and thinks Uni Watch is the greatest blog in the history of ever.

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Thanks Coleman! Great job — and I appreciate the perspective of a naval man. Wait, what? Anyway — I tend to agree with that assessment pretty much 100%. Well…not quite. Loved Army’s “gold” (now that is what ‘gold’ should look like) and I have no problem with ‘stealth’ numbers (although the “Battle of the Bulge” theme, *cute* as it was, was completely unnecessary, and was only visible up close). I was not a fan of Navy’s number fonts (I thought they were too thin) and while I got what they were going for with the helmet — it didn’t work for me. I did like the ‘shoulder board’ treatment, but the Nikelace was awful.

One very cool feature I didn’t notice at first. Despite Philadelphia, where the game was played, being about mid-way between Annapolis and West Point, Army was the “home” team — which means that Navy supplied their own balls. So, they put the “BEAT ARMY” signal flags on the ball. Nice touch.

Well readers — give Coleman a nice round of applause for a nice writeup — and tell us — what did you think?

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Logo … a-Go-Go

You fine readers will recall several weeks ago I ran a post that featured Ricko and some of his ideas for creating MLB logo t-shirts. Several readers expressed interest, and one even turned this mockup into this reality. Good stuff.

Around that time, I got an E-mail from colorizer-extraordinaire Gary Chanko, who had an idea along similar lines:

Phil,

A few weeks ago you highlighted a set of vintage MLB logos from the Fifties. I thought these were terrific and wished for a set of NFL logos from the same period.

I started to look and easily found a few. But the resolution was generally poor for these bit mapped images. So I decided to create a new set based on vector graphics to eliminate the scale up problems with the jpg grapghics.

My team in the Fifties was the Colts, the real Colts from Baltimore. So I started with their team logo from that time period. (The graphic format is editable PDF) If there is reader interest I’ll continue to work on the vintage logos from all the NFL teams from this era.

Just let me know…

Gary

So — readers — are you interested in having Gary create a set of NFL logos for us? If so, drop me a line or say so in the comments below. OK? OK!

Big thanks to Gary for the offer!!!

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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.

Like the colorizations, I’m going to run these as inline pics — click on each one to enlarge.

And so, lets begin:

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First up is Steve Wojtowicz who is missing hockey:

Hey Phil,

I have been looking for ways to fill my time with no NHL hockey, so, attached are a few ideas I had for ways the New Jersey Devils could re-design their jersey’s. The home and road are basically exactly like their old “Christmas Tree jersey’s but with black replacing the green and the grey would be an alternate. It would be cool to know what you think. Keep up the great work.

Sincerely,
Steven Wojtowicz

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Next up is Marcus Hershberger who’d like to tweak the Colts:

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Hey Phil,

Here are some tweaks for the Indianapolis Colts. They haven’t had a uni change in a while, and I thought looked pretty cool.

Marcus

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We close today with Andrew Seagraves, who has a bunch of suggestions on how to improve the SCar Am-Pac/WWP unis:

Phil,

I know I sent you a ton of links for my “Letter Front Jersey” obsession (my historical links to those uniforms is lost now photobucket has changed it’s tune) and with all you’re involved with I’ll keep my description of these brief.

As we were discussing the Battle Grey South Carolina tops, some suggestions in the comments section on Sunday (9/14 I believe) were made about how different pant colors could work if they were combined with the Jerseys. So, I took those suggestions to heart. I did tweak the jersey a bit so those shoulder stripes didn’t bug me anymore, and even changed the digital camo pants on a couple of sets so the stripes matched the helmet and the color of the camo wasn’t a navy blue grey. On a few I included camo in the area between the front and back shoulder stripes and did one set in complete digital background. The template I used was from Tim E. O’Brien and I kept his name on there to give credit.

Let’s see if they show the Grey top’s potential.

Cheers!

Andrew Seagraves

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And that’s it for today. Back with more next time.

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Johnny Football. Congrats.

That’s it for this fine Sunday. Enjoy the pros today, and have a great week. Big Bowl Previews and Predictions coming up next weekend. Stay tuned.

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“Navy’s helmets look like a pin my aunt would wear.”
–Jennifer Sweet