Iconic (or at least long-lasting) helmet logos and designs (Part 2)

Time for Part 2 of our look at first-year logos that became popular, or least stuck around a while. Part 1 is right here.

I discussed Princeton's 1935 uniforms in this post about the time an imbibed fan ran onto the field during a Dartmouth-Prineton game. Suffice to say, it's one of the most iconic designs in college football, at least if you're fan of Michigan or Delaware.

Princeton ditched the design in 1938, frequently going with plain orange helmets for the next 60 years. In '98, the Tigers revived the design to coincide with their move into brand-new Princeton Stadium. The result was once of the classiest uniforms I've ever seen. In 2012, Princeton reversed the colors and the design — at least to these eyes — seemed to lose its magic. 

Any team called the Rams damn well better have rams' horns for a design, right? Rhode Island debuted the horns in 1955, as discussed in this post on the Rams' Refrigerator Bowl team. After only two seasons, however, the horns were replaced by numbers, In '62, the horns returned and remained there in a variety of shapes combinations until 1993. In 2000, with a new coach, Rhody re-embraced the horns (as part of another classy uniform) and remain to this day. In 2011, Rhody adopted the current light blue-on-navy design.

I don't know if you can call a logo whose original run was a mere decade iconic, but if you lived in New England in the 1990s, you'll remember the UMass logo from the Minutemen's widely successful men's basketball program. (I always called it the "Calipari logo" as a result.) The swooshing "U," the "Mass" that looked like it came out of the 70s — it was hard to forget. I think the basketball teams used it a few years before football adopted it in 1993, but I could be wrong. In 2012, 2019 and 2021-23, the logo was revived as an alternate.

These appeared in the William & Mary student paper "The Flat Hat,"
in 1994-95. Two things: 1) "The Flat Hat" is dumb name for a paper;
2) "Dumb-ass Yankees?" You lost the Civil War in 1865, I'd suggest you get over it.

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After many years of using plain white helmets with numbers on the side, New Hampshire unveiled its first helmet logo in 1976, an interlocking "NH" that was rounded on the top and bottom, almost giving it the shape of a football. Amazingly, the helmet stuck around until 2000, when the Wildcats replaced it with another long-lasting logo. I wrote more about the 1976-77 Wildcats here and here. And best of all, the logo made a (more-or-less) full-time return in 2024!

Long before Oregon and other schools made a plain letter logo iconic, the Ivy League schools had already mastered the art. A plain serif "Y" is dull as dishwater anywhere else — but on a Yale helmet it's a classic. The Bulldogs first wore it in 1966, Carm Cozza's second year as coach. I first wrote about the '66 Bulldogs here; this uniform lasted for three decades.