Welcome to this website’s off-season sports sartorial content. We are counting down the world’s top 50 most iconic sports uniforms. Only current uniforms apply, we are not including one-off or alternate uniforms. Let’s stick to the basics.

#37

Tennessee Football

(clears throat)

“Rocky Top, you’ll always be
Home sweet home to me
Good ol’ Rocky Top
Rocky Top, Tennessee!”

It hasn’t always been pretty for Tennessee in the uniform department in modern times, although the bulk of their issues–with the standard uniforms at least–have been saved for the road set. We’ve seen the white jerseys with orange shoulders, orange pants, orange helmets, and in more recent years plenty of forays into the gray and black uniform sets. I think most Volunteers’ supporters would tell you they’ve largely been a miss whenever they try to improvise.

The same cannot be said for Tennessee’s home uniforms.

The school has been wearing their “Tennessee Orange” since the 1920’s and adopted the now famous block “T” helmet logo for the 1964 season. Those helmets have seen small modifications through the years. Originally, the team wore a thin orange stripe down the middle of the helmet with gray facemasks. In the early 1970’s, they switched to a pair of thin orange stripes down the middle before adopting one single thick orange stripe a few years later.

By the 1980’s, the Vols were using white facemasks and have not changed this ever since on the standard white helmet. From 2004-06 they switched back to a thin orange stripe and from 2015-17 they made one of the more aggressive changes in history with a fading checkerboard pattern down the back of the helmet stripe.

There are few sights finer than Tennessee taking the field in Knoxville on a sunny afternoon. With the checkerboard end zones and the crowd coordinated in that same design, it’s college football heaven to see the Vols in their crisp orange jerseys with white pants and helmets.