Ivy League (2021)

It's the most wonderful time of the year ... time to begin checking out the uniforms of 2021. Today, we begin with the Ivy League, since its season is all done; besides, it sat out all of 2020, so why make 'em wait any longer?

Oddity that may interest only me: Seven of the Ancient Eight teams wear Nike unis, and of those seven, five have a basic two-stripe pattern on the "sleeves." (They're not real sleeves, but work with me here.) 

We'll go in order of the standings, which means we start with the school with the most Ivy titles in history ...

Dartmouth won a share of its 20th Ivy League title, and I'm still scratching my head over that shutout loss to Columbia at home. Uniform-wise, the Big Green expanded its use of the secondary tree logo, even plastering it on the helmet for a game (the aforementioned loss to Columbia). The new white pants also features the tree on the sides, while the black and gray alternate pants (not to mention the black alternate shirt) are holdovers from previous seasons. 

A couple of corrections from the 2018-19 graphics: The back numbers on the home and road jerseys are HUGE (almost vintage Seattle Seahawks huge), and the black pants, which I always thought had "DARTMOUTH" on the back, actually features ... a tree.

Princeton grabbed a share of its 13th Ivy crown, with its one loss coming to Dartmouth. (Does this give Dartmouth the tie-breaker for the NCAA FCS tourney berth, har-har?) The Tigers made a couple changes this year: The white jersey worn for the 2019 Yankee Stadium game against Dartmouth became the full-time road jersey (complete with the college football 150th anniversary  patch from that year!), and a gray alternate jersey to match the gray pants, also a holdover from '19. The gray jersey has the "classic" Ivy League logo, as the league still can't decide on a full-tine logo. (I ranted about that here.)  

Harvard put up its best record in five years and beat Yale, so it was a successful season all around, presumably. The Crimson made some changes this year, going with a plain white "H" on the helmets after years of black outlined in white. The jerseys, which had been largely unchanged since 1980, ditched the traditional block numbers for a cross between the Chicago Cubs and Star Trek, also rendered in plain white on crimson. The black alternate shirts that had been worn since 2015 were dumped (yay!), and the traditional tan pants returned for the season's final three games.

Columbia, in addition to having another strong season under miracle man Al Bagnoli, set a record that may never be equaled on this blog: The Lions wore 10 different uniforms in 10 games. I believe the only teams to come close to 100% were UMass in 2013 (11 in 12 games; the Minutemen still hold the single-season record for most combos of any of the teams covered on this site) and Dartmouth in 2016 (nine in 10 games).

In the interest of completeness, I have listed the uniforms game-by-game. Columbia wore three different helmet designs: Current logo (weeks 1-4), throwback with numbers (week 5) and a hybrid with a logo on one side and a number on the other (week 6-10). Throw in four different jersey styles (including a kick-arse 1961 throwback) and three different pant styles and, well. ... Columbia really just scratched the surface with these 10 combos. 

Yale, on the other hand, is the symbol of simplicity, and knows how to add a few slight modern touches to freshen up an otherwise plain look. The lone Nike holdout, Yale retained its look from 2019, with the exception of a "DS" patch worn in the season opener against Holy Cross.

Next is a three-way logjam for the Ivy basement. Penn eliminated the awesome red throwback helmet from 2019 and revived the white lids from '18, albeit with a weird pattern that belongs in the '90s. In this post, I noted that Penn went 0-18 wearing white helmets in the mid-50s as it was transitioning from a big-time schedule to a more traditional Ivy slate. Two of the Quakers' three wins in '21 came in the white helmets, so perhaps they're being better luck this time around. Everything else about the uniform, including the red alternates (worn exclusively with the white helmets this year, making for a very appealing combo), stayed the same from 2019.

Brown did some interesting things to its unis. White the Bears introduced new home and road jerseys with silver trim, the helmets and pants retained the silver-with-red-trim look, making for an odd Frankenstein uniform akin to 1970s Maryland. Maybe if we made the helmets and pants more in line with the jerseys, like so ...

... then Brown would have a winning combo. 😎

The Bears also added black alternate pants and retained the (still plain) brown alternate helmet from '19. Like Dartmouth, Brown has pretty big numbers on the jersey backs.

Lastly, Cornell kept its look from 2019, right down to the 2000s-esque league patch on the road shirts. The white alternate jerseys with the names on the backs, however, appear to have vanished.