Agreed, but mostly only because of the white helmet. We have enough of a "scattered history" as far as pants go that I think we could absolutely make the move to, say, white pants at home with those exact stripes. I would just want us to keep the orange helmet.
On this note, can anyone help with previous iterations before 1989? It is more difficult to find those pictures/sources and I was only born in 1991, so I lack knowledge here. I will put a picture of our home uniform for each just to jog people's memories.
ILLINI DEFAULT UNIFORM COMBOS BY ERA
Lovie Era: 2018 to Present
Home: O/B/O ... also mixed and matched in all orange and all blue.
Away: O/W/O ... also wore blue pants on the road occasionally and especially starting going
O/W/W a lot more last season.
Alternate: O/O/W ... also mixed and matched in all orange.
Notes: Bielema edited this helmet to have a white outline around the Block I, a white facemask and a
W/B/W stripe. We also had a Gray Ghost uniform, and we would occasionally wear blue or white helmets under Lovie (e.g., I distinctly remember the embarrassing loss to Eastern Michigan at home in 2019 having a
W/O/W set).
Beckman Era: 2014 to 2017
Home: O/B/O ... seemed to wear a white helmet quite often, too, and we really just kind of messed around with the combos week to week.
Away: W/W/W ... this one was difficult, because we had SO many different combos, but I remember us going with these all white "Storm Trooper uniforms" very often.
Alternate: W/O/W ... a lot of other options, including the very questionable
O/O/B a few times.
Notes: Take these "defaults" with a grain of salt, because this era seemed to literally have every single combination we could think of, thrown out there at random. Including the picture below just for the LOLs:
Zook Era: 2006 to 2013
Home: O/B/W ... once Beckman was hired, I think we messed around with blue pants at home some, but during the Zook years, he seemed to love the white pants.
Away: O/W/W ... sometimes we wore orange pants (I remember we did during the Rose Bowl season when we lost at Iowa, because I was there...), but again - Zook loved the white pants.
Alternate: O/O/W ... I don't think we wore these until 2008, but then they popped up regularly.
Notes: Some time during the early Beckman years, we switched out
ILLINOIS for the Block I on the same helmet, but the base uniform remained the same.
Pre-Zook: 1989 to 2005
Home: O/B/O ... despite that random picture I found of the white pants, I don't remember us hardly ever deviating from this look. The only exception I can remember is that home game vs. Michigan where the refs screwed us over, I believe we wore blue pants.
Away: O/W/O ... as I have posted earlier in this thread, we also utilized
O/W/B rather often, including during the comeback win at the Big House.
Alternate: O/O/O ... any photo I have found during this era with our orange jerseys is an all orange look ... and it's not good, lol.
Notes: The first game I remember watching as a young Illini fan was the frustrating double OT loss to #1 Ohio State at home in 2002, so anything before that is before my time. Maybe we mixed and matched a bit more back then.
So, it seems that other than for Zook, since 1989 the
O/B/O look has been somewhat of a mainstay at home. The road jerseys have been a bit more all over the place, but probably more
O/W/O than anything else? The orange jersey has not been utilized enough since 1989 to establish a "norm," IMO.
I want the Illini to have a "traditional" look that we can keep for decades to come, but I am not opposed to things other than those color combinations that were actually used in our past. For example, if we wore white pants at home back in the day and it looks good in a new set, I am all for it. Frankly, I think orange pants on the road do not look very good, and I would support either
O/W/B or
O/W/W if the white pants have a good stripe pattern and are not as plain as our current set. My knowledge of our "uniform tradition" does not extend back too far past what I posted above, unfortunately.
