UCLA Confirms They’re Going to Bust Out Alternates, Spurning Tradition

UCLA will strut into the Coliseum on Saturday night unveiling an alternate look to go with their powder blues, which allows us to assume that the picture above will not be a preview of what’s to come this week. The word on the street is that they’re a set of all whites, which have been worked tremendously at both Cal and Oregon, as you cannot underestimate the value towards recruiting and swagger with some of the players.

"UCLA will unveil an alternate uniform Saturday for its game against USC, athletic directorDan Guerrero announced in his weekly blog Tuesday. Guerrero didn’t give any details, though published reports have speculated the uniforms will be all white. Guerrero added that UCLA would give hints about the new look on its Facebook page and through Twitter. “We will be unveiling a uniform that we have been working on with the adidas design team for several months,” Guerrero wrote. “These new uniforms will provide us with an alternative to our existing road uniforms but will not replace them in perpetuity.”The reaction from players was mixed.“I don’t really care about any of that stuff,” senior running back Derrick Coleman said. “All I’m really focused on is beating them. The uniforms don’t mean anything if you lose. I don’t really care what happens, I just want to beat the Trojans. At the end of the day that’s what we all came here to do.”Senior safety Tony Dye, one of the team’s captains, has no say on the matter. “Those equipment people won’t budge for anybody,” he said. “It’s kind of frustrating because I’m a captain and they wouldn’t tell me, but I’m praying and hoping it’s all-white. But that’s me just guessing. … You know I’ve been pushing for all this, but I gave up on all that at the beginning of the season.”Said junior cornerback Aaron Hester: “It would give us that extra confidence. You look good, you feel good, you play good. A lot of people around the country think our uniforms look good now but having something different, like an alternate would be nice. I think this is the right time to bring them out.”"

Link: Pete Yoon (ESPN Los Angeles)

As seen in the quotes, players love this sort of thing. It was also evident across town when last night on Twitter, as USC wide receiver Robert Woods sent the USC community into an angry frenzy when he trolled, saying that SC would wear all-blacks, and that Cardinal and Gold is akin to PCs, while Cardinal, Gold, Black, White and whatever other color Nike would wish USC to wear, is the Mac lifestyle. These are 19-year-old kids. They want to look the best they can, because they have no preception of the John Robinson era at USC or the Terry Donahue era in Westwood. You can’t really blame them for that.

So while I can understand why so many look negatively at alternate uniforms, I think many need to understand their allure to the student athletes. I don’t think that wearing an alternate jersey once a year or even twice, is going to kill anyone. Especially with schools like USC and UCLA, where you have to think that any alternate set of uniforms would keep tradition in mind. LSU’s Nike ProCombat get-up was pretty classy, so why can’t USC or UCLA have something similar.

Kudos to UCLA for having the gusto to pull it off, even though it will be a slight let down to not have the ultra traditional cardinal vs. powder blues.