Another recruiting picture with the white Georgia helmet showed up this week.
The Dawgs started using a white helmet with red and black stripes, in addition to the power G, as a photo op gimmick for recruiting last summer. They reportedly never intended on the team wearing the helmets in a game.
Still, seeing 4-star recruit Daniel Calhoun post a photo of himself in the recruiting-only white helmet when he announced his commitment to UGA reminded me of the Georgia Bulldogs helmet that almost was back in 1964.
Back in 2010, I wrote a Blawg about how, when the football uniform was overhauled by the Dawgs’ then new coach, Vince Dooley, he considered going with a white helmet sporting the new “power G” emblem in either red or black on the side and red and black stripes down the middle — very similar to the helmet that recruits now pose in, as well as the helmet Gainesville High School’s Red Elephants wear these days.
Instead, he wound up going with the red helmets introduced at the start of the 1964 season and which Georgia wears to this day. (Many of us consider it the best-looking helmet in all of college football. In fact, Green Bay even tweaked its “G” a few years back so that it more closely resembles Georgia’s.)
When former Auburn assistant Dooley arrived in Athens to take over from the fired Johnny Griffith as UGA’s head coach, Georgia football was in a pretty sorry state, and the new coach decided a new look was in order.
For at least a dozen years before that, under Wally Butts and Griffith, the Bulldogs had worn plain silver helmets to match their silver britches, (though they occasionally added a red stripe down the middle, and they had a square red G affixed to the side of the helmets for a few games during the 1962 season).
In later years, some fans lamented the decision to go with white pants instead of the “silver britches,” but Bulldog Nation apparently wasn’t that attached to the silver lids, because I don’t recall any uproar at all when Dooley decided to get rid of them.
The new helmet design that replaced the silver ones was done by Anne Donaldson of Athens (my seventh-grade art teacher), who was married to UGA assistant coach John Donaldson).
The “new look” helmets were red, with the new black “G” logo in a white oval on each side. The “G,” which Dooley liked because it was “forward-looking,” was inspired by the helmet design worn by the Green Bay Packers, who gave their blessing to Georgia’s design.
The new helmet was an instant hit with fans, but what wasn’t generally known for decades was that the red helmets almost were white.
This is something I first became aware of in 2009, when I was looking at Mark Schlabach’s book “Georgia Football: Yesterday & Today” (West Side Publishing), and on Page 77 was a photograph from before the 1964 season in which quarterback Preston Ridlehuber modeled the new look: red jersey with white numbers and white pants featuring red and black stripes down the side. The photo apparently was intended as some sort of demo of the new uniform, because it has arrow notations on it for the color and width of the stripes.
But what really caught my eye was the helmets sitting on the ground in front of Ridlehuber. They both sport the elongated “G” that we’re now familiar with, but instead of being the familiar red helmets that the team ended up wearing, they are white. One has the “G” in red; the other has it in black. And both have red and black stripes down the center of the white helmet.
I was shocked to see something other than red helmets in the picture. I decided during the summer of 2010 to write a Blawg on the subject, so the first thing I did was call up Dan Magill, the retired sports information director and men’s tennis coach — who had forgotten more about Bulldogs sports history than anyone else ever knew. I asked Magill whether he could tell me anything about the white helmets, but he didn’t recall them.
He said to ask Coach Dooley, so I did. I wanted to know close we came to actually having the Bulldogs wear white helmets, and who finally decided on red.
When I got ahold of Dooley (who always was very approachable), he explained: “We were experimenting with different helmet colors at the time, though I was always in favor of the red helmet and decided on the combination of black on white on red, described by a very noted person as the ‘most harmonious colors in existence.”’
The former coach added that the final decision of going with red helmets instead of white “was my call.”
While I was at it, I asked what prompted him to bring back the silver britches in 1980, after 16 years of mostly white britches (with red pants worn for road games in the late 1970s and through the first game of the 1980 season, and then trotted out a few more times between 1985 and 1988).
“Just a hunch,” Dooley told me. “I felt that the not so tasteful cheer associated with the silver britches when I first arrived had gone with time.” (The UGA student body used to have a chant in the pre-Dooley era that rhymed “britches” with another word, which the new coach didn’t like.)
Plus, Georgia was coming off a 6-5 season in 1979, and Dooley thought the silver britches “would rekindle the spirit of the Bulldog Nation.” (In reality, since they went unbeaten and won a national championship, the Dawgs of 1980 could have worn just about any color pants and no one would have cared.)
Overall, UGA has messed around with its uniforms a lot less than many other college programs. In the post-Dooley years, Jim Donnan introduced black britches, which looked great with the white road jerseys in the Outback Bowl on New Year’s Day 1998, but were a flop with fans when paired with the red home jerseys the next season in Jacksonville. Donnan also briefly tried to insert white pants back into the rotation, but that didn’t last. Neither did the black stripe he added to the center of the red helmet, an idea that Ray Goff also briefly had tried out for the 1991 Independence Bowl game.
Early in his tenure, Mark Richt made a point of saying he liked Georgia’s traditional uniforms and didn’t see any need for variety, but he eventually gave in to player and fan pleas for a black spirit jersey — and it was a resounding success in its two appearances in the 2007 season, combined with fan “blackouts.” The first time, against Auburn, when the team came out for warmups in red but then changed into black jerseys before the game, prompted one of the loudest ovations I’ve ever heard at Sanford Stadium. The red helmets, black jerseys and silver britches looked really sharp, no doubt about it.
(Which brings up a question that I used to hear quite frequently from fans: Why did Georgia go away from the “real” silver britches that had a sheen at some point during the Richt years and replace them with a “fake” silver that’s really a matte gray finish? I never could get a satisfactory answer to that — the blame mostly was put on Nike — but, since I haven’t heard the issue raised in recent years, I guess that furor died out.)
As good as they looked, though, a lot of superstitious folks soured on the black jerseys after the Bulldogs lost handily to Bama while wearing them in 2008. And then came the return of the black britches in the 2009 Jacksonville game, in combination with black helmets that looked rather like Grambling’s. Unfortunately, the Gators won and, after that, black was suitable only for describing the mood of the Bulldog Nation.
Despite some talk from then-Athletic Director Greg McGarity about the black jersey becoming an annual thing at the start of the Kirby Smart era, it actually has made only three appearances so far during those years — the Louisiana-Lafayette game in 2016 and then a revamped version (with a red spiked collar) in the Mississippi State game in Athens and Peach bowl game against Cincinnati during the 2020 pandemic season. All three of those black jersey games were wins, incidentally.
The latest version of the black jersey, introduced in 2022, hasn’t been worn in a game yet. It drops the spiked collar for a regular red “V” collar, like the one used on the white road jersey.
Interestingly, when I chatted this week with Dave Williams of the athletic department, one of my go-to guys on Bulldogs history, he noted that “everyone thought Coach Richt started the black jerseys. We actually wore black jerseys in 1942.”
I knew there were a couple of pictures of players in a black jersey from that fabled season, when Frank Sinkwich led the Bulldogs to a national title, but I’d heard some folks question whether the team actually wore the black tops in any games.
Dave maintains that they did wear them. “My Dad says he remembers them.”
While some folks still are a little gun-shy about the Dawgs wearing any jersey other than red or white, I’ve heard from a lot of fans in recent years who’d like to see the black jerseys used at least once a season, perhaps in the final home conference game. (The reason for specifying the final conference game is that no one wants to see the Dawgs play host to Tech in Athens wearing anything other than red!)
I’m generally OK with the occasional alternative uniform. I love the black jerseys. It’s also worth noting that most of Georgia’s other athletic teams wear black fairly regularly, and the official school colors are red and black, which I happen to think is the best color combination in sports. That’s even the name of the UGA’s student newspaper, and fans love hearing the Sanford Stadium announcer say, “If your blood runs red and black … "
As for the other alternatives that have been tried through the years, I never liked the pairing of black jerseys and red pants under Donnan, and hated the Nike Pro Combat uniforms (red jersey and red pants) that the Dawgs wore in a loss to Boise State in the 2011 Chick-fil-A Kickoff Game in Atlanta. Fans rightly derided those uniforms as the “Power Ranger” look. Actually, the silver helmet part of that outfit wasn’t bad, though the red stripe down the middle was way too wide. I wouldn’t mind a revamped version of that silver helmet with the power G sometime. And, on a special occasion, I’d also get a kick out of a true throwback silver helmet from the early ‘60s with the red stripe or square G — or both!
Generally, though, I think Georgia’s home uniform is the best-looking in college football. However, I think the white road jerseys could use a tweak, and, in fact, the Dawgs already have worn one that I’d like to see return —the white “throwback” jersey, with red and black stripes on the sleeves, that the Dawgs wore with red britches (which I also love) on the road against Arkansas to honor the 1980 team as they opened the 2020 season. I thought that uniform looked really great and would be in favor of it becoming the standard road-game attire for the Dawgs.
My son and I both pay attention to all the little variations in Georgia’s uniforms. We weren’t big fans of Nike’s rounded “Bulldog Bold” font introduced on all UGA sports uniforms in 2013 and were happy that the football Dawgs returned to a traditional block number font this past season.
Young Bill even has a favorite UGA basketball jersey (black with red letters and numbers outlined in white) that the roundball Dawgs have worn a few times in recent years, and we both have favorite UGA baseball caps. Mine is the red cap with black bill and black block G that was worn by Steve Webber’s Diamond Dawgs during the 1990 College World Series championship season, and my son managed to get one of the 1963 UGA caps (all black with a red block G outlined in white) that the Ebbets Field Flannels vintage sportswear company briefly offered last year.
As for that white helmet that the recruits have sported recently in their photo ops at Butts-Mehre, I noticed when I wrote about them last year that younger fans liked the idea. I heard from several who would like to see the Dawgs wear white helmets in a game every once in a while. Older fans generally were aghast at the idea.
I think the white helmets look pretty cool, and I can see why the recruits like them. Last year, I suggested maybe the all-white kit (helmet, jersey and pants) could rotate with the red pants for the first road game of each season (not counting neutral-site games). The G-Day game also might be a good time to try them out.
And here’s another idea: Maybe the white helmets could be some sort of one-time-only special thing, with the game-worn helmets then sold off for charity.
Wouldn’t that make an interesting conversation piece in your den!
