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Could the Florida Gators wear black football jerseys for the first time ever this fall? According to a report suggesting a Nike t-shirt design is really a Nike jersey, it's possible.
Source tells me these nine Nike black T-shirts are, in fact, designs to be worn this season: pic.twitter.com/zyVjSYQ5l7
— Andrew Lind (@AndrewMLind) August 2, 2015
— Andrew Lind (@AndrewMLind) August 2, 2015
There are significant points for this report by Andrew Lind, formerly of Land-Grant Holy Land sub-section Uniform Nation: He's had good sources on Nike developments before, and the images he's posted — of black t-shirt designs that look like jerseys for Alabama, Florida, Florida State, Georgia, LSU, Ohio State, Oklahoma, Oregon, and Texas — all look like (relatively subdued) Nike designs. All of the designs, except Florida's, are currently available as Dri-FIT t-shirts on Nike's website, and you can grab the Gators version of the t-shirt at the GatorZone shop.
If Nike were to roll out black jerseys — or all-black uniforms — then doing it with nine schools as high-profile as that list suggests makes sense.
On the other hand: Lind has been wrong about Florida before, suggesting that the Gators would wear orange for a 2014 game against Kentucky; instead, they donned their customary blue tops and white pants. And Nike introducing a slew of black jerseys for prominent programs would seem to be information that Nike would really, really rather not have leak.
Black Gators uniforms, and other tweaks to the classic Florida uniform template — which has been mostly unchanged for 25 years, since Steve Spurrier's arrival in Gainesville, with various one-off Nike designs sprinkled in over the last decade-plus — have been a popular topic for fans for years, though there's never been much indication from Florida that such a thing was a possibility. And black uniforms are, of course, an emphatically Bad Idea for the first few weeks of any given football season in Florida, when the weather is still typically brutally hot and humid.
But I could see Florida donning black uniforms for a game against Tennessee, or Mississippi. And there's no doubt that this is the sort of aesthetic gamble, with "black" serving as a stand-in for "cool," that could send a charge through Gator Nation.
So now we'll have to wait and see if this report has any validity.