Not to leave out my own school, here are OU's ugly alternates. Alternate universe, I wish.
They could be worse, but they're pretty bad as it is. This is called the "Rough Rider" uniform, presumably to honor Buffalo Bill rather than Theodore Roosevelt. Surely we wouldn't want to honor a war (
shudder!) hero, so it must be Bill Cody, a self-promoting con-man/marketing genius long before Phil Knight was even a gleam in his grandfather's eyes. OTOH, it might be for TR after all, as he signed the Oklahoma Statehood Bill into law in 1907.
You can't tell it from this picture, but the red on the helmet and the shoulder panels has a wood-grain look. They tell us with straight faces that this is to honor the men (and women, of course) of the Oklahoma Land Run of 1889. Many of them rode wagons, see? And the wagons were made of wood. It's such an obvious tribute that I missed it completely.
And, yeah, the "sooners" were the ones who sneaked across the start line the night before to scout out the prime real estate.
