Florida Gators announce 2022 uniform schedule

The Florida Gators have worn a lot of different uniforms over the last five seasons, breaking out throwback and fauxback looks that paid homage to the saurians’ sartorial stylings of the 1960s, an alarming “swamp green” uniform that revolted many, and white helmets of multiple varieties that paired with a few different tops and bottoms.

For Billy Napier’s first season, the Gators are getting back to what’s always worked.

Florida released a full uniform schedule for the 2022 football season on Thursday, and it would seem to contain no set of uniforms more exotic than the Gators’ lesser-used blue-on-blue and white-on-white getups, neither of which is slated to see the field until November.

In fact, Florida will take the field in just two different combinations — a blue shirt and white pants for home games and a white jersey with blue bottoms for away games, each paired with orange lids — until November, when it will wear four different combos over its final four games.

Those last three will all see “alternate” styles, with Florida going with an all-blue uniform for its home finale against South Carolina, a white-orange combo for its trip to Vanderbilt, and a white-on-white “stormtrooper” look for its regular season finale against Florida State in Tallahassee.

Florida is also set to wear orange helmets in every game in 2022, likely a return to the simplicity of the orange lids with the blue script Gators font on them that has been a stylistic signature of the program for over 30 years.

While Florida’s Homecoming date with Missouri is not specially designated on this schedule, there still remains the possibility that the Gators have another riff on their throwbacks — worn in each of the last three years with different helmets bearing old-school logos — available for that game that still adheres to the listed blue-and-white combo. Although announcing a full slate of uniforms for the season is also a departure from the week-by-week process of recent years, one imagines that Napier’s program could make an exception for the beloved retro-inspired designs that have come to be a Homecoming staple.

And as for the black uniforms that Napier has mentioned not as a possibility but a certainty? Fans will have to wait at least a year for their debut, if this release proves ironclad. Napier has suggested that Florida will wear black as a tribute to military veterans and first responders, raffling them off to raise money after the fact, but the Gators’ home game closest to Veterans Day — traditionally dubbed its “Salute to Those Who Serve” or similar — is the meeting with South Carolina slated for the only all-blue game of the year.