#TheReturn Brings New Uniforms

The 2017 season will be a special one for UAB fans. Football is finally back after a two year hiatus. Coach Bill Clark stuck with the program through the dark days of the shut down and has worked tirelessly to put a team together for this fall. The new-look UAB Blazers will be different in many ways, including their uniforms.

(Original photo via Mark Almond, al.com)

UAB signed a a seven-year agreement with Under Armour that began in June of 2016. The deal is worth just over $7 million, and the University will net $50,000 per year, with a million dollar allowance each season for equipment and uniforms. Previously, UAB had been with Nike, but switched over for many reasons, one of which being Under Armour's new field office in Birmingham, located right across from Regions Field, home of the Birmingham Barons and UAB's baseball team for most of the home slate.

The new deal brings a ton of promise for the Blazers. The football team will be sporting new green and white uniforms that are rather similar to the previous Nike set. Both feature contrast colored shoulder caps with a unique dragon scale pattern sublimated over the color. For the green jerseys, the Nike editions had white shoulder caps, whereas Under Armour made the better move by making them gold.

The new jerseys actually seem to be a custom template from Under Armour. It looks to be a mixture between the old "double stitch" template that led to smaller nameplates and tapered stripes and the "ungrabbable" template that Under Armour is putting teams in currently. You can see the differences between the three templates in the image below:

The biggest downgrade with the move comes with the headwear. When UAB unveiled their new Nike uniforms back in 2014, there's was a massive fanfare of the large dragon logo on the side of a shell that featured a green gradient around the bottom complete with dragon scales. The two dragon scale helmets quickly rose to favorite designs among uniform fans like myself.

UAB and VICIS have partnered to help create safer football
helmets and monitor their impact on concussions

Also, UAB has partnered with VICIS to study helmet safety. VICIS is a company that was founded to help create new helmets and safety equipment that significantly reduces impact forces. The NFL put up a lot of money in grants a few years back to companies to help develop safer helmets. The VICIS ZERO1 helmet has been tested by multiple universities and NFL players and will soon hit the market. WR Will Hasting was the first Auburn player to wear the helmet, as seen during the annual A-Day game in April. Each helmet currently costs about $1,500, significantly more than other leading helmets.

In other changes, it looks as though the Blazers will only have one pair of pants this season. Their last season, they switched between a new pair of white pants and their old gold pants. The new pair is basically the same as the old golds, just with the Under Armour logo replacing the Nike swoosh on the front right hip.

2017 looks to be a promising step back on the gridiron for UAB. For weekly uniform updates, be sure to follow me on Twitter as I post the weekly uniform results and other tidbits for Auburn, South Alabama, the Jacksonville Jaguars, and now the UAB Blazers. This site will mostly be updated with any big news (alternate uniforms) and end-of-season results and recaps. More timely info will be available over on Twitter.

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