New 2016 Basketball Uniforms

For the third time in three years, the Auburn men’s basketball team will be sporting new uniforms. The women’s team will also be wearing new uniforms this upcoming season. Let’s take a look at both sets.

Throughout much of the last few months, Under Armour-sponsored basketball teams have been posting photos of their respective new uniforms. Obviously each team had their own designs, but they all shared similar elements, the most glaring of which being the collar. Teams previously wearing Under Armour’s newest template had “fangs” on the collar, where the solid material met a small portion of mesh. The mesh on the front of the collar (similar to Nike’s FlyWire collar on the football uniforms) abruptly ended any colors or designs that could wrap around the collar. Overall, it wasn’t the best for design purposes.

TJ Dunans shows off the new collar design at SEC Media Days in Nashville, TN (photo via Auburn Athletics)

The new collar eliminates the mesh portion on the front, and hearkens back to a much more traditional basketball jersey collar.

In addition to the changes with the collars, the mesh pattern has been toned down tremendously, on the jerseys at least, from last year. Previously, the entire back panel of the tops were mesh, with the front and side panels being solid. With the new template, the back and front are once again solid panels, with the side and a new shoulder panel being mesh.

The shorts, on the other hand, have received a major template change. Last year, much like the jerseys, the back of the shorts were all mesh. This year, there’s a mesh panel down and around both sides of the legs. The shape of the panels are very reminiscent of the “bracket” style stripes that Auburn and many other Under Armour teams wore in the spring portion of the 2014-15 season.

The template overall isn’t bad. There’s some new, possibly unnecessary, panels that have been added. The biggest downgrade isn’t so much the design of the template, but more so how certain colors are represented across the different panels. Auburn took their photos while wearing the orange uniforms, so this was extremely visible in photos and videos.

The non-mesh panels across the uniform looked like Auburn’s natural orange color. The mesh areas, unfortunately, were a different shade, a darker shade, of orange. They reminded me of the “sweatboxes” that have plagued Nike’s football templates for years now. Hopefully they don’t absorb sweat like the football jerseys, and, better yet, aren’t as visible in person or on TV as they were in the photos. We’ve only seen the orange uniforms in full (the whites were shown to be used for the filming the hype video, but we couldn’t see them well in the teasers, and the blue uniforms have yet to be broken out), so we can only hope this issue is most visible on orange and red colored uniforms.

Many of the new changes are visible as Anfernee McLemore poses for photo day (photo via @AuburnMBB)

The men’s jerseys didn’t change much. The collars have changed, as mentioned earlier, and the side stripes were slightly tweaked. Instead of going all the way to the armhole trim colors, they stop a bit short and the template stitching.

The shorts received more of a design change. The AU logo previously sat on the front of the left leg, but has now been duplicated and moved onto the side stripes. Because of this, those stripes have been “cut” to accompany the new logo placement.

To better showcase all the changes in the template and design, here’s a handy side-by-side of this year’s uniforms and last year’s.

The women’s team will also be sporting new uniforms this season, with a similar design and template to that of what the men’s team will wear. There aren’t as many photos of the women’s uniforms as the men’s, so we’ll have to do with what’s available.

The women’s team poses with their new uniforms (photo via Karina Anglada twitter)

First off, the uniforms retain the ever-popular Northwestern Stripes, this time wrapping around the leg. Unfortunately, though, the template forces them to taper off on the inner thigh. Similar to the men’s uniforms, the AU logo sits on the outer side of the legs and “cuts” the stripes off. The new template acts similarly to the men’s unis, with the two shades of orange across the two different materials.

One nice touch to these new jerseys is the addition of the Northwestern Stripes on the collar. It’s possible these could be a little overbearing, but I think they add a nice bit of color to the top portion of the jerseys, and in turns matches the stripes on the shorts.

On top of the new uniforms, both teams will be playing on a new court design. The new design was placed over the summer, and more details are here.

Alongside the new court, the Auburn Arena has been updated with new LED banner lights. The previous “ring of honor,” per say, has been removed in place of the screens. The honors previously placed there are going to be memorialized on banners hung from the ceiling. It’s interesting to see Auburn make this change, as they claimed there was no room to hang banners when the Arena was originally built.

The new ribbon lights in the Arena are live. Switching colors right now are pretty disorienting pic.twitter.com/OVR5Fj3g3X

— Clint Richardson – Auburn Uniform Database (@Clintau24) October 22, 2016

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