The all whites with chrome did not suck.
Anything with that salmon color sucked.
Anyone remember the foolish argument that the uniforms used the official Pantone color defined in some official Rutgers style guide? There were 2 things wrong with that..
1) The color was chosen for print purposes because a bright scarlet red on bright white paper is unreadable.. same for bright white lettering on bright scarlet red on signage.
2) the silver/gray score marks on the shoulders and numbers and letters serve to BLEND the gray and red thereby making the salmon look.. and that doesn't even consider the color of the light from the sun, clouds or stadium lights. But this si why the all-whites worked... the silver/gray was dark enough to see against the bright white.. and even if it blended a little bit it still showed as white.
As for "approval" of the unis... contracts for support from Nike were probably mostly to blame. There has to be some pressure to change things, shake things up.. sell more new and different "official" products. We might have more say in the matter with Adidas... though I suspect there is competition among the big Ten's many red and white schools to not have too-similar looking colors and uniforms. Any conflicts probably go the way of the more valuable contract.. more valuable to Addidas.
- Big Ten
- Nike: 50% (Illinois, Iowa, MSU, Minnesota, Ohio State, Oregon, Penn State, Purdue, USC)
- Jordan: 11.1% (Michigan, UCLA)
- Adidas: 22.2% (Indiana, Nebraska, Rutgers, Washington)
- Under Armour: 16.7% (Maryland, Northwestern, Wisconsin)