August 16, 2005 will go down in Duke lore as the day the football program finally turned itself around.
Don’t feel bad if you missed what happened; pretty much everyone else did too. Or at least, I should say, pretty much everyone missed the gravity of the situation.
On that fateful day, two things happened. First, Duke football unveiled new jerseys that ended a 12-year string of increasingly awful sartorial creations. Second, H-back Ben Patrick wore his new uniform number.
In 1992, the last year of the Golden Years of the Duke Football Uniform Design, the Blue Devils wore a simple style. The home jerseys were blue with white numbers and two white stripes on each sleeve. The away jerseys were white with blue numbers and two blue stripes in the same place. The team wore white pants with two blue stripes and a white helmet with a blue stripe down the middle with the word “Duke” written in script on both sides.
When Steve Spurrier led the Blue Devils to their only ACC Championship since 1962, these jerseys were worn. When Dave Brown passed for 479 yards—still a Duke record—in a win over North Carolina in 1989, he was wearing one of these jerseys.
Unfortunately, 1993 was the beginning of a too-long stylistic slide. The sleeve stripes were inexplicably dropped in favor of numbers on the shoulder pads.
Just one year later, Sept. 3, 1994, became a dark day in the annals of Duke Football. Not because the Blue Devils lost—they didn’t—but because that day the color black became part of Duke’s football uniforms. The helmets were changed from white to blue, lost their stripe, and the color of the script “Duke” was changed to (gasp!) black.
From that day forth, the black only spread. In 1999, a black stripe was added to both the white and blue pants. In 2000, the jerseys, both home and away, gained black collars. In 2003, Duke’s Nike-designed blue home uniforms included impossible-to-see black numbers, black collars and vertical black panels under players’ armpits that crept up around toward the neck. And the pièce de résistance? Horrendous black pants. It was a fashion crime.
The black pants were dropped last year, as well as the black and blue helmet, but the black underarm panels and the collar-creeping stripes remained.
Finally, the gentlemen and ladies at Nike decided that enough was enough. Duke Football might have been a joke for a decade, but its uniforms would be respectable. And on August 16, 2005, the Blue Devils unveiled a sensible design: blue jerseys with white numbers at home, white jerseys with blue numbers on the road and plain, white or blue pants with the Duke logo to go with both designs. And across the front, “Duke” in block print-because how can you play for the name on the front of your jersey if it isn’t there?
It’s simple, yet elegant and powerful.
And while we’re on the subject of simple, elegant and powerful, consider the statement Patrick made by switching numbers from No. 83 to No. 8. No. 83 is a tight end, a blocker who sometimes catches passes. He has good hands, gets to the first -down marker on important third downs and generally provides a big target for his quarterback.
But No. 8 is something different. No. 8 is a star, and he wants you to know it; that’s why he chose No. 8 in the first place (even if he didn’t think about it at the time). Which position he plays is not important because he will get the ball in his hands and he will make plays. He not only catches the ball over the middle but catches the ball, sheds a couple of tackles and runs with astonishing speed for such a large man for 30, 40 or 50 yards.
In college football, where players can choose whatever number they desire, the best players wear numbers in the single digits or teens. Deion Sanders wore No. 2 at Florida State. Keyshawn Johnson and Mike Williams? Both wore No. 1 at USC. Reggie Bush wears No. 5 for Southern Cal and UCLA’s Mercedes Lewis, the consensus top tight end in the nation, wears No. 19.
Patrick, who is nominated for the Mackey Award, given to the nation’s top tight end, made the statement that he is ready to be that guy.
And the Blue Devils, by switching uniforms, showed that they’re ready to be a legitimate football team. In the AP Preseason Top 25, only Miami and Cal had uniforms with the strange swoops and markings that characterized Duke’s old duds. Good college football teams wear simple, elegant uniforms, and great college football players wear low numbers.
The old sporting cliché goes, “When you look good, you play good.” If the adage holds true, Patrick and the Blue Devils are on their way to greatness.
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