The Refugees have spoken…it looks like there were a few candidates yesterday that really seemed to stand out from the rest when it comes to the subject matter of a bad helmet.
Congrats, Terps. It looks like a tattoo artist attempted a Dali painting on a helmet, which would serve as a better cap for a crotch rocket captain than for a football player. This is the same program that fired Ralph Friedgen in his 2010 ACC Coach of the Year season to replace him with Randy Edsall and then DJ Durkin…so the trashy and psychedelic Panama City-vacation-airbrushed-t-shirt-meets-state-flag look really seems to fit.
Paul Johnson unveiled these for the night game against FSU in 2015. The only talented athlete on Tech’s team at the time was Harrison Butker, who kicked a thousand field goals and Tech ended the game with a blocked field goal for a TD and snapped FSU’s four year ACC win streak (not a big deal in 2015). Geeks everywhere shit their pants and a legend in Tech apparel was born. The win put Tech at 3-5 in the year and they wouldn’t win again, closing out the season with yet another home loss to Georgia, 13-7. (Turns out it would be Richt’s final victory of his Georgia career, with Sony Michel running for about 150 yards and Grayson Lambert just doing Grayson Lambert things). Bryan McClendon coached the TaxSlayer Bowl while Richt was headed to Miami, and Kirby Smart was on the sideline.
By the way, yellowjackets do have hexagon shaped tubes inside their nests, so the shape on the helmet is accurate. Fun fact – Yellowjackets are wasps that can sting multiple times without dying. In calling the helmet the “Honeycomb” design suggests that Tech, in fact, are bees, which die after one sting. Maybe it should be their permanent helmet.
While we are on the subject of Richt, there were two other mentions of horrible headgear, which squarely falls on our shoulders. Exhibit the first:
Personally, I didn’t hate it. I can’t tell you what combination of colors would make it work, but on a white jersey with black pants, meh. Honestly, I’ll take our traditional unis and our recent history of whooping ass over cutesy wardrobe changes.
To make it worse, it was another gimmicky thing to try to make an underwhelming Joe Cox team somehow beat the #1 team in the nation with a Halloween outfit. We got our ass handed to us in the WLOCP and Tebow broke Herschel’s rushing TD record, too. In retrospect, we should’ve dressed as ghosts or wore some form of Predator-level transparent cloaking outfit, or just disappeared all together.
Still, it wasn’t as bad as this:
What in the actual fuck was this? 2011 featured a handful of teams getting a unique Nike Pro Combat uniform, from Army and Navy to LSU. These select teams had a unique and decent look to them (except Ohio State’s, it was about on par with ours), and when they got down to designing Georgia’s, it was like they passed it off to an intern and said “eh, we’re tired, just color something and we will go with it”. Turns out the intern was either a toddler or a comedian, because the resulting Power Ranger outfit was neither splashy, unique, or imposing. No, it’s just really, really sucked giant donkey balls. As did Isaiah Crowell and company on our way to a 35-21 loss to Boise State in the 2011 Kickoff Classic.
I actually met my wife at that game on September 3rd, 2011, and we would subsequently go to every home game that season as we started dating. Even went to the SECCG and watched LSU hand it to us, but it was our second date in the Dome that year and, lots of football later, we were engaged and got married about a year after. We have three kids together, the youngest named Georgia, which was decided late in the evening as Sony Michel ran a wildcat sweep into the end zone to beat Baker Mayfield at the Rose Bowl. Lots of memories in the thirteen years since and I still can’t forget how remarkably awful the 2011 Georgia uniforms were. The coaches wore bright red shoes and my wife remarked “they look like clowns”. They were operating like them, too. Sigh.
I’ll leave you all with another repeated mention, which is this:
Not hard to hate these. FTMFs, and that’s all I’ve got to say about that.