This week was an interesting study in contrasts. Oregon-WSU was mono gray vs. mono-white, while Cal-Arizona was similar all-blue vs. all-white. UCLA-Colorado was a battle of gold teams, with both wearing gold helmets and pants but black and white jerseys. The only special uniform was ASU in its "Dark Mode" dark gray heathered set.
Being that color is major part of the theme of this blog (see my 2021 analysis of school color shades), I got to thinking of the cool, funny and ridiculous names that the Pac-12 teams use for their colors. This weekend both WSU and ASU wore dark gray uniforms.
Washington State has a nice official palette of red and gray...or should I say "Crimson" and "Gray" But the shade of dark gray that WSU (and ASU) wore this weekend is alternately referred to as "Anthracite." The official University Brandbook does not actually mention "Anthracite," and this currently-trendy moniker appears to be a Nike thing, which makes sense since the teams that flaunt it are Nike teams. A quick Google image search shows Purdue, Arkansas, TCU, Air Force and Kentucky being the most common teams to join WSU in this name:
But calling dark gray by this name has been all the rage in this decade of ALL consumer products being gray! Its certainly sounds cool, but who actually knows what anthracite is? Well I'll tell you...it's basically coal, and the name is just a cooler way of saying charcoal gray.
Nothing dramatic this week, except new yellow/black helmet for Ducks, Sparky head helmet for ASU and rare use of silver helmet for Colorado, and uncommon use of white pants for Cal. Utah was the only mono team this week.
The Pac-12 had a quiet offseason from a uniform standpoint, despite the USC/UCLA announcement of the LA school moving to the Big 10 in a couple seasons. Oregon, Washington and USC all have new coaches but not seemingly new uniform philosophies. WSU's coach was interim last season but gets to put his stamp on the program this season.
Week one had a relatively normal slate of uniforms and nice mix of color since 9 of the 12 were home and the Ducks went color-on-color vs Georgia. The only unique element was Colorado going with a retro looking helmet with stripe and CU monogram instead of buffalo.
