Hogs to display ‘special’ uniforms against Aggies

Arkansas will have a completely new look for the game against Texas A&M on Saturday morning.

In honor of alum Jerry Jones’ induction into the NFL Hall of Fame, the Razorbacks will have a special “Dallas Cowboys” look for the game, as you can see from the photos.

“What do you give a man who’s had everything and now is going into the Pro Football Hall of Fame?” athletics director Jeff Long was quoted as saying at ArkansasRazorbacks.com. “When I saw this idea, I thought there it is.”

PHOTO BY ARKANSASRAZORBACKS.COM

This may be the best look the Hogs have ever sported, to be honest (well, with the exception of the black shoes, but we’ll get to that later).

For a team that, quite frankly, has been in need of a uniform upgrade look, this is about as close to getting it right as they could get.

Oh, there are some things that need tweaking as I’m sure Nike’s group of idiot designers (who may be the worst in the business) somehow put the Hog logo in white instead of red outlined in white, which would have shown up far better on television.

Of course, they don’t have white shoes, which is something the Cowboys have required (with the exception of some stars who had one-off shoes on occasion) since 1974, and that was a story in and of itself.

Tom Landry didn’t like the fact that players were wearing a mix-match of shoe colors on the field. For a coach with an engineering background who had a healthy dose of OCD, it just didn’t fit.

Tex Schramm had commissioned a study (and Tex was never shy about spending Clint Murchison’s money) where he had learned that white shoes and white socks had an almost subliminal positive effect on television viewers. He wasn’t shy about saying you designed a uniform by looking at it on television.

“They like looking at players in white shoes more than those clunky black things,” Schramm said, telling the story years later.

He was telling a young columnist in 1984 about his final uniform masterpiece for the Cowboys’ uniforms, which he had spent a decade or so honing. He burned, by his estimation, “at least $10,000” in expenses using the lights at Texas Stadium and network television cameras along with a hundred or so designs.

PHOTO BY ARKANSASRAZORBACKS.COM

The result was a total re-do of the Cowboys uniform. In case you don’t know, the pants with white jerseys are actually a blue-green color in person that show up silver with the white jerseys while the ones with the blue jerseys are pure silver.

But in 1974 the shoes were the biggest issue.

“I kinda liked the black shoes with white laces,” Landry said years later. “Tex wanted white, so I talked him into putting it to a vote.”

How did that come out?

“I didn’t count the votes,” Landry said with a chuckle. “That was Tex’s area.”

That’s how Tom deflected anything he didn’t want to deal with.

So, Tex, how did the vote come out?

“Don’t remember exactly,” Schramm said, actually making you believe he was thinking about the answer. “But I remember one vote clearly. We had a simple piece of paper that asked the players what shoe color they preferred.

“Everybody wrote black or white except one. Larry Cole wrote ‘brown.’ We went with white, so that must have been how the votes went.”

Especially with the final one being Schramm’s and that counted as many as he needed.

Arkansas has been in black shoes since Bret Bielema took over in 2013 with the exception of three games in 2015 when he went with white shoes. After back-to-back losses to Toledo and Texas Tech, he went back to the clunky black things.

Which, upon reflection, has pretty much matched how they’ve played.