Which color fits the Miami Hurricanes best? A dive into uniforms, team records

Harry Rothwell has been selling Miami Hurricanes merchandise at the allCanes store across the street from Mark Light Field since 1991, and even during a pandemic, he’s busy shipping orders.

“My biggest issue is I can’t see my grandkids,” Rothwell said Friday. “I have a new grandson that’s 5 weeks old. I haven’t seen him yet. That’s killing me. Other than that, I’m still working, thankfully. It keeps my mind off all the other stuff that I’m not enjoying. My knees are getting worn out every night praying there will be a football season of some sort.”

When I called Rothwell on Friday to pick his brain for a story on Hurricanes jerseys — including those sweet, all-black Miami Nights uniforms — it led me into a rabbit hole of Miami’s uniform history I didn’t initially intend to go down.

For starters, if you want to go all the way back to the beginning — in 1926, when Miami’s football program began — this 10-year-old blog entry is a good place to start. It features renderings and artwork of Miami’s earliest uniform combinations and leads us all the way through the championship era.

A couple of things I learned along the way: The split-U logo didn’t get put onto Miami’s helmet until the early 1970s, and the Hurricanes didn’t start using what is now known as its traditional white helmets until 1976.

For nearly all of Miami’s championship era (1983-2001), the Hurricanes wore traditional orange jerseys over white pants at home and white jerseys over orange pants on the road. Nike, which signed Miami in 1988 and made the Hurricanes the first college program to get outfitted by a shoe company, then developed an alternate set of green jerseys/pants that the Hurricanes began wearing in combination with their orange-and-white uniforms in the early 2000s.

Soon, throwbacks followed, including when Miami wore its gold-and-green 1968 uniforms in a home victory against North Carolina in 2005. Once Nike entered the Pro Combat era later in the decade, things really started to get wild with alternate uniforms around college football.

The funny thing is the Hurricanes have not fared particularly well in these alternate uniforms.

After beating USF 31-10 in their all-white Pro Combat uniforms in 2009, the Hurricanes lost at home to Virginia Tech in the next rendition of the Nike Pro Combat series in 2010 while wearing a rather hideous all-orange get-up with a green helmet.

The Hurricanes eventually signed a more lucrative deal with Adidas in 2015, but before leaving Nike, Miami went through a series of 14 uniform combinations from 2010 to 2014, including three helmets. Miami went 0-7 when it wore green, orange or two-tone white helmets and won only once in the three times it wore its specially designed “Smoke” gray jerseys.

“When Nike started making those alternate-color jerseys with the 2010 Virginia Tech game, that was the first time I remember them doing it,” Rothwell said. “Every time Nike came out with a new jersey, people have bitched about it. Yet, for the most part, we’ve had success selling them. Many people like them. This last one that came out this past season, the white parlay that we wore against Virginia, by far was the worst retail item that we’ve ever had as far as a different kind of jersey. It just did not sell from Day 1 at all. The funny thing is we won in that jersey. A lot of people say they won’t wear a jersey unless we win it. Of course, we’ve lost in every jersey we’ve ever worn. So that’s kind of a dumb statement, too. But people do say, ‘We won in that alternate jersey, so I’ll buy it.’”

Since switching to Adidas in 2015, the Hurricanes have worn three special alternate uniforms. The first was a black-and-metallic “Military Appreciation Day” get-up worn in a 2015 victory over Virginia.

The other two were introduced in 2017: an all-green “State of Miami” uniform with the traditional white helmet, worn in wins over Syracuse (2017) and Florida State (2018), and the all-black “Miami Nights” uniforms with specially designed black helmets, worn in wins over Virginia Tech (2017) and North Carolina (2018) and losses to Wisconsin (2017) and Georgia Tech (2018).

The Hurricanes were supposed to wear their “Miami Nights” uniforms again in 2019, but when a night game was moved to the afternoon for TV purposes, those plans were scrapped.

“The gray ‘Smoke’ jersey was probably the most popular one we ever had,” Rothwell said. “I’ve been here 29 years, and black was always a color jersey that we’ve always wanted. I think people do like the black — all-black with a black helmet.

“I mean, The U has always really looked good on a black shirt, black Polo, black anything, black license plate. I mean, it just jumps off. But from a retail-sale perspective, that smoke jersey was probably the best.”

Picking and selling jerseys

So what goes into choosing a uniform week to week?

Players usually have a say. But when Mark Richt was the coach from 2016 to 2018, he set the uniform schedule before each season. He deviated from it only once, switching to the all-black “Miami Nights” uniforms before the 2018 game at Georgia Tech.

Coach Manny Diaz, we’ve been told by someone on the equipment staff, selects his uniforms on a week-to-week basis. He usually makes his uniform selection by Monday or Tuesday of each week.

Rothwell said he looks forward to selling jerseys in 2020, but it’s not as easy as it used to be.

Since Ed O’Bannon won his lawsuit against the NCAA over the use of his name, image and likeness in a video game earlier this decade, schools have stopped selling officially licensed jerseys with numbers that could be interpreted as representing a particular star athlete.

To get around it, Rothwell said, schools and manufacturers have greenlighted printing officially licensed jerseys with No. 1 and in some cases the number of the school year for jersey sales.

“This year we were on our knees saying, ‘Thank you, Lord, for 20.’ We could sell 20 — 20 is a good number, especially for us because Bernie (Kosar) and Ed Reed wore it,’” Rothwell said. “And with D’Eriq King playing quarterback and wearing No. 1, that’s a good number, too.”

Rothwell said he expects Miami’s new jerseys to arrive in stores in July or August. But considering the state of the world amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Rothwell said, it could come later because many warehouses and companies aren’t operating. The No. 20, Rothwell said, will be made available only in orange.

Before the O’Bannon case, Rothwell said he was involved in helping Nike decide which numbers the shoe company would use on a Hurricanes jersey for each year. He said all that ended for Miami when Duke Johnson’s No. 8 was the last unique number produced, back in 2014.

“Right now, all of us are losing money,” Rothwell said. “If you don’t change your jersey number every year, you’re not buying a jersey this year if you bought one last year because it’s the same number, right? So, our jersey sales have declined each and every year because of that reason.

“You know who gets continually screwed in these deals? Joe Fan. The royalty rate just went up. So, things are gonna cost more.”

As the general manager at All-Canes, Rothwell has hired several Hurricanes athletes, including legendary return man Devin Hester, to work at his store. He’s also held many autograph signings where soon-to-be drafted or recently turned pros who played at Miami could make some money for their signatures.

Asked about the eventual changes the NCAA will make to its bylaws to allow student-athletes to make money off their names, images and likenesses, Rothwell said he’s not optimistic it will really help college kids much.

As it stands, the NCAA is not going to allow athletes to make money off jersey sales (in pro sports, athletes make a percentage) because it falls under the group licensing.

Autograph signings, though, fall into the category of profiting off a name. That’s sure to line the pockets of the bigger-name stars on campus, Rothwell said, but not the backup left guard or center.

“I lose money on most autograph sessions or break even,” Rothwell said. “I do it as more of a promotional thing to pay back the player.

“Now, if you’re in Alabama, you may hire the whole team to sit at your car dealership every Saturday and pay them all $1,000. But what’s the going rate for an autograph session? What are you gonna pay them to do it? I mean, there’s a lot of unknowns, as far as I’m concerned, on how they should be compensated accordingly.

“When Devin Hester worked here, we had to turn in paperwork saying we were hiring him and he was getting paid X and it had to be in line with what I was paying the rest of my employees to the same position. So it wasn’t like I could hire Devin Hester or Jimmy Graham and pay them $50 an hour while I’m paying everybody else $10 an hour.”

The unknowns are many regarding the eventual rules and regulations.

This much we can expect for sure: More in the way of alternate uniforms to help boost jersey sales once football returns.

As long as schools can corner the market on that, they’ll do so.

(Photo of Braxton Berrios: Steve Mitchell / USA Today)