Texas Tech football: Counting down the worst uniforms in Red Raider history

The Texas Tech football program has great uniforms these days but there have been some awful threads worn by the Red Raiders in the past.

Nowhere will you find more discussion about a team’s uniforms than among college football fans.  That’s certainly become an increasingly heated topic among Texas Tech football fans in recent years as the program has gone to differing its look from week to week.

The distinct and iconic uniforms are what give college football so much of its flavor.  That’s why what a team wears is so important to its fandom.

There have always been iconic looks from programs like Michigan, U.S.C., Texas, Penn State, Ohio State, and other blue-blood programs.  But in the last two decades, teams with less traditional uniforms have been pushing the envelope of creativity.  Often, they have pushed too far.

One look that drew plenty of chuckles from around the nation came from another school that is in the Under Armour family, Maryland.  Rolling out a look that featured the distinctive Maryland state flag on both the helmets and the shoulders of the uniform, these 2013 threads were the first UA uniforms that were based on state pride.  As we will soon see, that concept plays heavily into this list of Texas Tech’s worst uniforms.

Of course, the program that started the college football uniform roulette was Oregon.  Their awful looks are too numerous to dissect in this space but their combinations of neon colors, oversized graphics, and strange fonts have been widely debated by fans across that county, most of whom have no vested interest in the Ducks success on the field and for the powers that be in Eugene, Oregon, that’s the point.

In the modern era of Texas Tech football, uniform debates have become a pastime.  Now, fans even eagerly await the team’s weekly uniform reveal videos, which are released on social media every Friday.

Many even believe that the uniforms bring either luck or misfortune to the Red Raiders.  Maybe Tech fans are more concerned with uniforms than what might make sense because the uniforms are where the “Red Raiders” nickname was derived from.

"According to TTU.edu, “It wasn’t until 1936 that Texas Tech fans and students came to be called ‘Red Raiders’. Collier Parrish, sports editor of the Lubbock Morning Avalanche, gave the team its new nickname because of their all-red uniforms and rigorous coast-to-coast schedule. 1936 was also the year of the first unofficial “Red Raider,” now called the Masked Rider.”"

The school nickname and its subsequent identity were literally derived from the uniforms that the football team wore.  So yeah, Tech fans have a deep connection with our team’s gameday appearance.

That’s why the fans have been frustrated with many of the looks that the program has gone to in the era of rotating uniform combinations.  If we keep the program’s history in mind as we countdown the ten worst Texas Tech football combinations, the complaints that arose from these fashion blunders will seem even more legitimate than they were when we just looked at the uniforms at face value.