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An Open Letter To SU Athletics: Blue Has Got To Go

Nike, SU, no more blue...ever

Rich Barnes

Dear Dr. Darryl Gross and SU Athletics,

On behalf of the fan community from Troy Nunes is an Absolute Magician, we would like to formally request that within the next 48 hours, you make a public and legally binding declaration that no Syracuse University Orange men's basketball team will ever wear a blue game uniform again. Whether as an entire uniform, or some catastrophically ugly jersey/shorts mashup that only a 40-year-old hipster marketing hack from Oregon could dream up, blue belongs on some other team's backs (or back-sides as it were), not ours.

We fully understand that SU Athletics wants to push the envelope to establish our brand, keep things fresh, and generate more money for the school -- being "strategic", as Nike would put it. But there are two problems to achieving those objectives that we simply can't allow anymore.

First, blue is not an identified color that supports the SU basketball brand. We are orange...hell, we are "The Orange". You know whose brands are blue? Georgetown (well, grey too...and don't even get us started on that), Duke, Kentucky, Kansas. Did we mention Georgetown??? We want NO association with those schools' color schemes. In the college basketball world, Orange is really our thing...we should embrace it all-in. You want to keep things fresh? Think of other ways to feature orange, rather than replace it...chrome it up! matte it down! Whatever. Just do it Nike...with the color that matches our name!!!

Second, the color blue is now officially "jinxed". Look, we can argue all day about superstition and whether it is all nonsense or not, but the fact of the matter in the modern era, Syracuse has never won a game when their uniform prominently featured blue. Never. Losing away to Kentucky in all blue was nothing to be ashamed of, but we played poorly that day and the whole thing smacked at the time of sucking up to our blue-blood overlords. And now we have last night, perhaps the most unexpected loss in the program's history. Yeah, we're all 99.35% sure we lost not because of our uniforms, but because BC was better on the night, but we want to be damn well 100% sure the next time around!

Please know we appreciate everything you do for our University, and as a fan community we remain confident that our team will recover from this loss stronger than ever. But while we all pick up the garbage of last night's game and pull ourselves back together, we politely ask that one item is not kept, but discarded in the trash altogether...the color blue.

We anxiously await it's immediate and permanent removal.

Sincerely,

Your friends at TNIAAM