Pat Narduzzi comments on new Pitt football uniform renderings

At the risk of making the entire top part of the page about football uniforms that won't even be seen on the field for a year and a half, I figured it was worth checking in on the latest with uni-gate.

First, one thing I didn't mention yesterday was that the new uniform renderings didn't include the 'old' colors, Pitt will wear them on occasion - specifically, once per year:

Also, there will be an alternate fourth uniform style. Pitt will go back in time with the colors, but it won’t look anything like the uniform from the ‘70s or the throwback one from 2005.

The royal blue and mustard will make an appearance once a year.

That's really good to hear. As I wrote before, the colors do help distinguish Pitt from others. I'm not sure I want those colors for everything, but it will be nice to see a retro look of sorts with the old colors once in a while. My preference would have been to use the script as an alternative for special games (like the colors), but there's such a demand from the fans for it so it's really hard to argue with the line of thinking in using it full-time. If that's what the fans want, I give the school credit for picking up on that and listening.

So, okay, the big news that came out today regarding the uniform reveal from yesterday is that, you know, THEY'RE NOT THE REAL UNIFORMS. Pat Narduzzi jumped on The Fan today and really did his best to make that clear:

"I guess there's a buzz out there about the uniforms ... I guess somebody's got their own design. Our athletic director in charge of football Chris LaSala had mentioned to me there were some diagrams of what the uniforms were supposed to look like and I looked at them and I was like 'Wow, those are nothing like they're gonna look like... So all those fake ones out there you can't believe any of what they look like."

For context, that quote reads a little angrily, but it was far from that. Narduzzi even laughed a little about it. At the same time, you could tell that he very clearly wanted to quell any notion that the jerseys look terrible. Personally, I'll trust his judgment here. He's seen the real thing and we haven't. I stick by what I said yesterday in that we're a little early into this process for real criticism.

His comments were clearly a shot at KDKA, who, to my knowledge, is the only credible entity to release any sort of designs. After the uniforms aired last night, Richie Walsh, who initially mentioned on Twitter that they would be on during the news, followed up with this:

One thing I want to stress about the uniform mock ups from earlier is that it was only to show the color combinations.

— Rich Walsh KDKA (@RichieWalsh) May 20, 2015

Just for context, he tweeted that yesterday - well in advance of Narduzzi's comments this morning. So it's not as if he was responding directly to Narduzzi's mild criticism of the KDKA renderings.

So with all of the complaints about what the uniforms look like, just know that it seems we have a long way to go still.

Back to that interview with The Fan, though - one thing that Narduzzi said was that recruits definitely want to know what the uniforms are going to look like (not these in particular, but a school's uniforms in general). I echoed that sentiment yesterday in my initial post when these broke and said it really is all about the recruits. What might look hideous to a lot of us could be something an 18-year old kid is crazy about. Regardless of what you might think about the uniforms, the important thing here is that Pitt and Narduzzi realize this and are tailoring them appropriately.

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