The N. Period

With the announcement last week that the SMU football team would be sporting “new” uniforms, I felt the need to bring up the Mustangs’ schizophrenic handling of the color blue.  Now I’m not old enough to remember, but I can’t recall ever seeing the SMU athletic teams wearing anything but royal before the mid to late 1990s. But navy was the preferred hue of blue that the football team adopted in 2003. And there seems to be no explanation for this at all. For a school with as rich an atheltic heritage in the city of Dallas as SMU, it is a sad tale how much apathy has surrounded its programs since the NCAA dropped the Death Penalty on them in 1987.

Look at the school’s official colors and you’ll see that they are “Harvard Red and Yale Blue.” WHY?  That automatically dooms the Mustangs to aspire to be a copy of another school, AT BEST!  I’m sure schools with such strong ties to their colors as the University of Texas look at SMU and just laugh.  Who can tell me where the non-official usage of navy came from?

Its not just the football team, either.  In recent years the soccer teams, basketball teams, and even the cheerleaders have been seen clad in navy. Let’s hope with the introduction of these new football duds, which hearken back to the Pony Express days of Eric Dickerson and Craig James, we are now seeing the abandonment of navy, which is not even a sanctioned school color.  Oh, and by the way, with the new June Jones-era unis the school has introduced are in a shade called “SMU Blue.”

Looks like hoops are back in royal now, though.

Why oh why SMU do you play fast and loose with your colors?  What other sports team, at any level, does this?  Southern Methodist University — pick one color and stick with it. Please.  Maybe you’ll see that people care about your teams when they think that you actually do.

What do you think? Please tell me what you think in the comments.

Thanks to hombre de steel for the vintage banner photos.