The Virginia Cavaliers are back in March Madness. Not as an inconsistent at-large team, not as a play-in participant, but as a formidable squad that no coach should want to go against going forward.
The ’Hoos last made the tourney in the 2023-2024 season, a First Four loss to Colorado State in what ended up being Tony Bennett’s last game as UVA’s head coach. But now? The ‘Hoos are back as a three-seed in the Midwest region, where they’ll meet the winners of the Horizon League in 14th-seed Wright State on Friday.
We’ll have plenty of tourney coverage coming soon, but there is one aspect of this upcoming game, and tournament that needs to be brought up immediately.
Uniforms.
UVA has worn five different combinations this season, three of which were unveiled this year with the hiring of Ryan Odom, longtime uniform czar during his time at VCU. The other two were carryovers from what the program had been exclusively donning throughout the past five seasons.
UVA began sporting the two basic blue/white combinations starting in the 2020-2021 season, the year after the Covid-19 pandemic abruptly put an end to the college basketball season, halting conference tournaments and cancelling March Madness. A year where, for what it’s worth, the Cavaliers would have been a tough out had they been able to take the floor in the NCAA tournament.
For context, UVA is a Nike Elite program, meaning that Nike has primary say in the design of UVA’s main uniforms (the boring ones) with UVA essentially having their hands tied when it comes to how those come out. Why that’s the case? I’m not too sure. Seems like teams should be able to control what they wear. That’s beside the point, though.
Ryan Odom touched on that at the beginning of this season when discussing UVA’s new collection of looks, saying “We’re a Nike Elite team, so we’ll always have the two (uniform combo’s) that are created by Nike,” Odom said. “We don’t really have a choice in the way those are designed. That’s a Nike thing.”
Nike should have been ashamed of itself back when these were put out, for starters. But aside from the fact that both the white and blue versions of this uniform are bland, lack the color orange, and simply don’t look as cool as the kind of jerseys a national title-winning program should be wearing, UVA’s NCAA tournament appearances in them have been nightmares. UVA is 0-3 in tourney games since the 2019 title and the switch from those sharp-looking uniforms, two of which were to double-digit seeds in the first round, and the third in a First Four play-in.
The endings of each season in these uniforms look like this:
- 2021: Loss to Ohio in first round of the bubbled NCAA tourney as a four seed
- 2022: NIT Quarterfinals
- 2023: Loss to Furman in first round as a four seed
- 2024: Loss to Colorado State in the First Four
- 2025: Missed NCAA tournament, loss to Georgia Tech in second round of ACC tournament
- 2026: ???
The results are jarring, enough to make a grown adult cry, even. I wrote this article out days before the ACC tournament, but with the ‘Hoos having not worn either versions of the main uniforms in a while, I wondered if that was a way of weeding them out of the rotation ahead of the postseason, until they wore the home white-version in the quarterfinal game against NC State.
And sure, the ‘Hoos pulled away late and won that game, along with plenty of others in these same uniforms throughout this season and the idea of a curse or some sort of a bad luck based on uniforms may seem a little out there, but we have seen enough of a sample size where games have gone terribly wrong to not take this March problem seriously.
No chances should be taken ahead of Friday’s game. Whether it’s hiding them somewhere, burning them, ripping them, paying a fine and telling Nike to go kick rocks…I don’t know. But we need someone to play hero-ball and make a play here. For the sake of this team’s success and the happiness of its fans, these jerseys must stay far, far away from any March Madness court the ‘Hoos take in the coming days, and hopefully weeks.
The new ones work just fine:
