Ivy League (2022)

Time to look back at the uniforms of 2022, starting with the Ivy League! Teams are presented in descending order of finish, which means we lead off with the most intriguing bunch, a team as prone to change as much as its baseball brethren in the nearby Bronx  ...

Outright champion Yale, the longtime winner of the KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid!) award for its reliable white helmets and plain blue jerseys and white pants, tossed tradition like a penalty flag and embraced it at the same time. First, the Bulldogs switched to big, curved numbers not unlike those the Los Angeles Rams use. Next, they added a special alternate uniform to celebrate 150 years of football at the university: A cream-colored jersey with faux stitches down the middle to simulate a 19th-century jersey, with a navy blue helmet and navy pants. You can read more about this uniform, which has several subtle elements that honor the team's history, here. The blue pants were worn again later in the season, and hopefully they see more game time, along with the blue helmet, in 2023.

Other than some mixing and matching here and there, Penn kept the same playbook from 2021: Two helmets, three jerseys and two pants. This is a good uniform, although I wish the Quakers would bring back the 1970s-style helmet from 2019 in some capacity.

Princeton made some small modifications to the black home jersey and the black pants (the "P" was replaced by a "Princeton Football" logo in Week 2), but nothing much changed from 2021. The upper back of the black shirts has the "old" Ivy League logo, which was phased out in 2019, but I guess refuses to die. I ranted a little about the Ivy logo change here.

Harvard, which overhauled its uniforms in 2021, revived the black alternate shirt in the new design. I dunno, I still prefer the classic numbers to the Star Trek font, but then I also pine for the return of the triple option, so what do I know?

Columbia did it again, and I don't mean putting up a winning record for the second straight year, although the Lions did that, too. A year after wearing 10 different designs over 10 games, Columbia pulled off the feat again in 2022. As I did last year, I organized the uniforms by week rather than by home/road/alternate. As for the unis themselves, the Lions added a navy blue helmet, which has a "C" on one side and a number on the other (grrr ...). The white helmet does the same thing, only with a lion in lieu of the "C." A new blue alternate jersey was added; its design was more in line with the black and white jerseys. The light blue alternate shirt also returned.

Cornell made a few minor changes. The Big Red replaced the block numbers on the road jersey with curved versions, kinda like those on the short-lived 2019 alternate, and the white pants now mirror the red versions. For the last game of the season, the iconic (well, iconic to me, at least) "C" was replaced with a tiny script "Cornell." Hopefully, this was just a one-shot experiment. 

Geez, Dartmouth, I didn't expect to find you down here. The Big Green made some minor changes to the pants and the white and black jerseys, which now lack shoulder numbers. (If you've watched the NFL lately, you'll see those "TV numbers" are rapidly becoming a thing of the past.) The new(er) Ivy logo is now on the jersey fronts, as is a patch celebrating the 50th anniversary of Title IX. (I believe 1972 also was the year women were first admitted to Dartmouth.)

We wrap up with Brown, which made a few changes from last year. The Bears dumped the classy ivy-in-the-B logo for a plain block "B." The brown alternate helmet, which was blank last year, now has a "B" on one side and a bear outline on the other. I still say there either needs to be some red trim on the shirts or ditch red from the helmets and pants entirely; the uniform just looks mismatched otherwise.