Auburn’s Music City Bowl Aesthetic History

Auburn travels to the great city of Nashville next week for the Music City Bowl, their second appearance in this bowl game. The first time, Auburn faced off against Wisconsin. Auburn will face Purdue in the 2018 edition, a first-time opponent.

Follow along as we dive into Auburn’s Music City Bowl history and uniform history across the Tigers’ 81-year bowl history.

Uniform History

That first appearance in the Music City Bowl featured Auburn in blue and Wisconsin in white. Tommy Tuberville’s Tiger team ran away with a 28-14 victory after being up 7-6 at halftime. Carnell Williams and Ronnie Brown both scored two touchdowns in Auburn’s first Nashville bowl victory.

Judging from the home-away team designations from the previous games, Auburn should expect to be the home team. Although we saw Auburn wear white when selected the home team earlier this season, I don’t think the Tigers will repeat that. Expect to see Auburn in their home blue jerseys, just like their only previous appearance in the Music City Bowl.

Purdue has many options when it comes to their uniforms. Prior to the 2016 season, the Boilermakers revealed a slew of new uniforms that could be mixed and matched for each game. The white, black, and two-toned grey jerseys each featured a glossy set of stripes on the shoulder yoke, used to resemble the grill – the “cowcatcher” – on the front of train locomotives. They also have three pant options, in grey, white, and black.

Purdue has enjoyed playing around with helmet designs over the last few years. They’ve added a tapering railroad track stripe, thrown the train logo on the side, added player numbers, and even thrown in neon yellow a time or two. Having black, gold and white shells – some matte, some glossy – simply weren’t enough. The Boilermakers now sport gold chrome helmets in their uniform arsenal. 

It’s difficult to guess what a team could wear when they have so many moving parts. I hope Purdue wears their grey alternate uniforms and the gold chrome helmets. Why? Why not!

The grey alternate uniforms, with their dark grey, possibly black, shoulder yokes add some contrast to a rather simple uniform design. We see Auburn face off against teams in their white jerseys all the time – how about something different? Same holds true for the gold chrome helmet. Only one team has ever worn a chrome helmet shell against the Tigers before: Kentucky in 2015.

Although I hope to see the grey jerseys, I do think Purdue will still sport their white tops.

Field History

Nashville’s Tourism and Visitor Center, among others, uses a unique font for their wordmark which simply reads as the name of the city. The current logo has graced the end zones of the Music City Bowl field since *whenever*. Back in 2003, when Auburn faced Wisconsin, it wasn’t nearly as formal of a design.

The end zones featured the large music-symbol footballs in the corners and the city name in the center. The font, however, was a bit different. In fact, as I was recreating the 2003 field design for this site, I had to recreate each letter from scratch. The Gaylord Hotels Music City Bowl logo was placed at midfield.

Since then, the end zones have been painted in team colors. Sometimes the entire end zone is painted, sometimes just a small box around the lettering. Last season, in what was the 20th anniversary of the game, the end zones were painted with a top coat of green, attempting to cover the Titans logos from the weeks prior. The wordmark was then painted in team colors.

The Titans finish their season with two home games at Nissan Stadium, one before the Music City Bowl and one the day after. With that, we won’t get a good look at the field design until a few days before Auburn and Purdue hit the gridiron.

Based on last year’s design, I think this might be a good representation of what this year’s field will look like. 

End zone lettering has been painted in the primary color for each school. Last year, with Kentucky facing Northwestern, they were painted in blue and purple, respectively. So, contrast obviously isn’t a huge concern.

With Purdue only having black and a light gold, and Auburn with navy and orange, either combination of only-primary colors or just the secondaries would fail to contrast well. I imagine they will most likely go with black end zones for Purdue and navy for Auburn, but black and orange seem to show up better.

The Music City Bowl will mark the 43rd bowl game for the Auburn football program. Auburn holds a 23-16-2 record in bowl games, dating back to the 1937 Bacardi Bowl in Cuba.

Since 2007, Auburn has had two streaks in which the team wore the same jersey color for four straight bowl games. Between the 2007 and 2011 editions of the Chick-fil-a Bowl, Auburn went 4-0 wearing blue, including the 2010 National Championship victory over Oregon. The 2013 National Championship game against Florida State saw the Tigers wearing the white tops. That started another streak of four games in which Auburn wore white. Auburn went 1-3 in those four games, with the only victory coming in the 2015 Birmingham Bowl over Memphis.

With Auburn wearing blue in last year’s Peach Bowl versus UCF and expecting to wear blue once again for the Music City Bowl, we are well on our way to bouncing back with another blue jersey streak.

Those streaks don’t hold a candle to the record, in which the blue jerseys were worn for seven straight bowls between 1987 and 1997.

Looking for more?

Check out the history of Auburn’s bowl game uniforms here.
A collection of uniform match-ups since 2013 can be viewed here.
You can view all the documented bowl game field designs in one place.

The Auburn Uniform Database is celebrating five years in 2018! Take time to check out the brand new website and consider purchasing an anniversary t-shirt. Do you enjoy uniforms and want to see more like this? Be sure to follow the Auburn Uniform Database, like the AUD Facebook page, Instagram page, and follow me on Twitter for even more uniform news. You can also purchase your favorite team’s merchandise through Fanatics, with a portion of your sale going to support this website.

Featured image via Getty Images