Unconquered

Another conversation I have been privy on...

FSU went through many subtle uniform changes and by the late 80's early 90's had pretty much settled on a basic "Garnet/Red" jersey with white numbers and a "Gold/yellow" border, and white with Garnet/Red and yellow/gold border.

Nike wanted to jump full bore into the unifrom and apprall biz in the early 90's, all profesional leagues were bid contracts, you couldl not negotiate with oen specific team, you had to bid the entire league when the contract was up for bid (though the NY Yankees tried to have their own deal with addidas after Nike won MLB's contract), however college sports was an entirely different story, each school could negotiate its own deal.

Nike targeted the 5 biggest selling schools in terms of overall merchandise sales (based on 1992-93), they were ND, Penn St, Miami, USC and FSU. ND did not want to have any sort of sole source contract, which was naturally a deal breaker, so the other 4 would be essentially the first schools to do this. In the meeting wiht the fashion designer (think RuPaul) Joe Paterno wanted nothing to be done to Penn St's uniforms and even at first objected to the Nike logo, if he had consented to the design, it would of been block numbers, with a thick blue strip running down both sides of the jersey's (a familiar design today, but groundbreaking then). Miami agreed to multiple uniform combinations, but they had constant reworks, and by the time they were ready the Canes were on probation, so the project was shelved till later in the decade. USC wanted traditional, and having a huge potential sales base in LA, Nike went along (though the uniforms were re-designed with a sort of throwback look that they wear today).

Which left FSU.

When the Nike reps (the lead one is who told me all this) and the designer went to see Bowden, they were shocked. Coach pulled out artists renderings of the different designs that had been kicked around, one had the Jerseys with gold arrows on the shoulders of the home jersey, and garnet on the away ones. Bowden while interested in making money for the school, also wanted uniforms that would appeal to potential recruits to give him another edge. They decided to keep the arrows but as a sewn in since it appeared they were pointing towards the players head and actually were too distracting. The biggest deal were the colors as everyone agreed bright yellow and red were not exactly going to sell as well, and were not the correct shades. So FSU wore the re-designed jerseys with tribal trim and the shoulder arrows for 2 yrs (94-95) and in 96 debuted what we now have, which was the correct shade of Garnet and actual gold. FSU has, no matter how bad a yr they have had always been a top selling school for Nike, and a lot of it has to deal with the design not only of the logo, but the Nike R&D work.

So if you are still awake there is a not so exciting little off-season story for ya.