Florida vs. Michigan: Gators wearing all-blue “color rush” Nike uniforms, white helmets

The Florida Gators will wear all-blue Nike uniforms that resemble the apparel maker’s “Color Rush” uniforms for NFL teams in this Saturday’s meeting with the Michigan Wolverines in Dallas, Nike revealed on Monday.

Florida had previously teased what appeared to be a monochrome dark jersey on Sunday night, in a video purposefully lit to produce speculation about whether the Gators would wear their blues or a new black uniform.

Shortly after taking over as the NFL’s official uniform provider in 2015, Nike instituted a “Color Rush” program with the league in which eight teams donned (mostly) monochrome uniforms for late-season Thursday night games. In 2016, that program expanded to all 32 teams, and the league’s full Thursday slate.

In addition to the all-blue uniform, which Florida’s copy-paste of Nike’s release describes as “flooded blue” — untimely, that — thanks to all-blue cleats and gloves, among other accessories, Florida will wear its white alternate helmets, which debuted in 2015. The helmets feature the script “Gators” in metallic orange and blue on one side, and the school’s familiar slanted block F on the other, with metallic orange stripes flanking a blue one down the center.

Florida has worn all-blue uniforms often — 25 times since 2005 — but usually pairs blue jerseys and blue pants with the contrasting school colors of white and orange in other accessories. The Gators have worn all-blue with their white helmets just once before, in a 2016 meeting with South Carolina. Florida has also paired the new-school lids with orange alternate jerseys, and all-white road uniforms, and blue-on-white looks in the last two years.

While Florida is tweaking its oft-used all-blue outfit, though, Michigan will be debuting an all-maize Jordan Brand uniform that is hideous reminiscent of many West Virginia uniforms a departure from the storied program’s classic white road duds.

The Wolverines have worn all-maize before — but that was prior to the Great Depression, and many generations prior to Nike’s predilection for making programs that wear its apparel look like those pages in the textbooks you totally marked up.

It seems as though Jim McElwain’s quarterbacks will have no excuses for not throwing to the right color jerseys in Dallas — except, of course, being blinded by the bright.