Uniformity: A captain “C” patch for football? Not so fast

Welcome to Uniformity, a special place of the internet dedicated to our healthy obsession with anything and everything to do with BYU uniforms. Here we’ll discuss updates to new uniform sets, explore the rich history of Cougar gear and pontificate on what the future could behold.

One thing that has always fascinated me about the recruiting process is when schools bring players in and have them dress up in the team uniforms. Obviously this is an opportunity to get a player excited about wearing your colors, but I still think it’s kind of funny how all of that goes down. Do they just bring the guy into the locker room and say, “Cool, and now is the part where you put on the football pads and pose for pictures”? Do some players say no? It’s a quiet period for football, so it’s my only opportunity to ask these important questions.

All of this is beside the point of this post, that point being the existence of a captain “C” patch that I saw on a football jersey being worn by preferred walk-on Jaylon Vickers. The committed recruit posted these photos of his visit on Monday.

There are two things that I noticed from these photos:

1. BYU has never used captain patches in the past (at least to my knowledge), so seeing one here was a little surprising. As much as I like seeing some kind of marker for the captains (a regular practice in hockey), it looks out of place here. There it a little too much going on between the NCAA logo, stretch Y logo and Nike swoosh to have the C to have it’s own space. So if you’re ever wondering why BYU doesn’t use the C patch, it’s probably because it doesn’t look all that great. Does this mean BYU could implement the patch in the future? I highly doubt it.
2. It looks like BYU is having the players pose for photos in the old “Flywire” uniforms that they stopped wearing in 2016. This last season the Cougars upgraded to Nike’s newer uniform template that doesn’t feature the old V-neck wiring. You would think that they’d have the recruits wearing the latest and greatest threads, but BYU being ever-economical has found a good use for what are now the old jerseys.

The combination of these two points leads me to believe that this jersey was made for former BYU defensive back Kai Nacua, who was a captain for the Cougars in the 2016 season back when they were still wearing these Flywire templates. I did some digging and tried to find players wearing the numbers of the captains in 2016 (21 of Jamaal Williams and Harvey Langi and 7 for Taysom Hill) and none of them had the captain patch. Why this one jersey exists with the patch will remain a mystery.

UPDATE: Thanks to some great sleuthing by internet friends Nate Slack and Mitch Harper, it looks like BYU gave the captain C patch to their team captains back in 2013. The captain wearing number 12 in 2013? That would be JD Falslev. The number 12 seems to be a popular number for BYU captains as it has been worn by Tanner Mangum, Kai Nacua and JD Falslev in recent years.