Uniformity: A breakdown of BYU’s uniform record

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.

Part of life as a sports fan is being unhinged from reality, whether that’s made manifest in the unsubstantiated hope that’s rejuvenated at the beginning of every season, or the conviction that the louder you yell at the TV the better your team performs. Anyone who knows me understands that I embrace both of these ideas.

However, the most nonsensical notion that I will often embrace is the performance of my team based on the type of uniform that they are wearing. I know deep down in my heart that it absolutely does not matter what colors BYU wears each week, but I still get worried when they trot out in a uniform combination that doesn’t jibe with my personal preferences. Again, I know that I am delusional but that’s what is fun about sports.

So far this year, the basketball team has used four different jersey combinations, and being the uniform-obsessed person that I am, I decided to do a quick breakdown of how BYU performs in each set. Here are the results for the season thus far:

A few quick takeaways from this chart.

• The two white uniform sets (the standard home template and the beautiful throwback) will always have a better overall record because BYU is generally better at home than on the road. These sets benefit from the easier stretch of non-conference games to start the year while the navy and royal uniforms do the heavy lifting on the road.
• Based on my Twitter feed, the fans seem to overwhelmingly prefer the royal blue uniforms to the navy, but as we see here, navy has a slight edge in the W-L columns. While the royal uniforms did result in two nice in-state wins against Utah and Utah State, both of BYU’s bad conference losses (Pacific and LMU) came when BYU wore royal. My suggestion? Change it up and wear the royal uniforms at home where they are undefeated.
• Speaking of royal blue, I decided to look up the record of the football team this last year and it was also unkind to royal. While there wasn’t a single uniform combination that had a great record (the best being navy jersey and white pants at 2-2), the royal jerseys and white pants went 0-3 against LSU, Utah and Utah State.
• While the road navy uniform might not be a fan favorite, it has been there for the Cougars when they got a nice road victory over Princeton and another quality neutral site win over UMass. Their only loss in navy came on the road against St. Mary’s.
• Since I’m sure you were all wondering, here is my ranking of BYU’s threads. Top spot goes to the Danny Ainge-era throwbacks. Not far behind is the royal blue set and then the navy blue. Bringing up the rear is the home white uniform which is fine. Nike usually switches out the basketball templates every couple of years so we’ll most likely see something new from BYU next year.

***

While it’s pretty clear that strength of schedule and home-vs-road splits are more influential than they color of uniform that BYU wears, I’m still going to hoot and holler anytime they wear what I consider to be an unlucky uniform (it changes weekly). There was a stretch starting in 2010 where the BYU football team wasn’t capable of quality offensive output if they wore white pants and white jerseys. Sure, they were playing on road against Ole Miss, TCU, Texas and Florida State, but according to my flawed logic, it was the jersey combo.

I’ll probably keep fussing about it until I’m an old man sitting in the west stands complaining about the games being too late at night.