jordan brand

[Fuller/MGoBlog]

News bullets and other items:

• No one is expected to miss the entirety of fall camp
• Harbaugh noted that Chesson can be cleared by doctors and still not “cleared,” as there’s a process every player has to go through in going from being medically cleared to being 100% ready for all football action
• Harbaugh will keep an open mind when it comes to one-off alternate uniforms
• Jay Harbaugh came to his dad with the idea of switching not only to Nike but to Jordan
• Harbaugh called Michael Jordan one of humanity’s most evolved human beings of all time
• Biff Poggi hasn’t signed a contract yet but he’s slated to be either the assistant to the head coach or the assistant head coach and his responsibilities will include “all aspects of being the assistant head coach” so, uh, we’ll see.

So Dana [Jacobson] joked about putting the Jordan logo on the khakis, but--

“Why not? Why not?”

Will you get official pants with the Jordan logo on them?

“That would be wonderful. That’d be wonderful. That would be actually taking it up another notch.”

What do you make of this day for your players, to see the excitement on their faces? How big is it for them?

“You know, it’s big. It’s big. We’ve got a thing where we like to say ‘Who’s got it better than us?’ and the answer to that is ‘Nobody.’ Uh, expect possibly future us. It’s also an affirmation that, you know, we tell them, Jordan, the Jordan Brand, ‘Who could have it better than to have you?’ And then them wanting to have us, they’re telling us that they believe in us as well. It’s a very mutual thing.

“And you see it. You just walk by the aisles here. You see the product that they have and what else do you say? You just know it when you see it. It’s great.”

Jim, when and how did the conversation go down or the idea for you guys to reach out to them and the conversation between you and Michael?

“Second day on the job I said I really want to be Nike. About a month or two after that my son, Jay, younger guy, you know, 26, 27 years old said ‘Hey Dad, I think he we should be Jordan.’ ‘Hey, great idea.’ It all went into motion and ended [when] Michael Jordan called me on the telephone and said that they wanted us to be the first and only football school, program, in the world to be Jordan. I said, ‘You had me at “Hello.”’ We’ve been working for this for a very long time.

“The other thing he said that I thought was profound was that- he told me, you know what Nike means to Oregon, you know what Oregon means to Nike. Michigan will mean that to Jordan. And that, I thought, was very powerful. I thought that was very profound. But he had me at ‘hello’ in that conversation.”

You have a big imagination, but when that conversation happened did you imagine all this buildup and all this lead-up to the thing the other night, today, all this stuff?

“No, I did not. But when you put people that are great at what they do then they just blow you away. They knock your socks, they hit it out of the park starting Sunday night: State Street closed off, M-Den has midnight madness for the opening of Jordan and there’s 4,000 people in the streets with the excitement of a national championship, Big Ten championship, some kind of championship-type of celebration. That was the first thing that struck me: this is really motivating; I want to have one of these to celebrate a championship as well.

“The enthusiasm of the people was next. Everybody that cared about Michigan was showing that enthusiasm at the highest level.

“The next thing that struck me was when I went inside the M-Den and saw the product and the way it was being displayed. I mean, this is first class all the way with a big exclamation point on it (!).

“And today’s another one of those type of days where you walk in and your socks are just knocked off. And you know it when you see it. This is great. Everybody knows something’s great when you see it, so that’s been my impressions.”

Charles [Woodson] said something the lines of ‘We’ve got our swagger back.’ What does it matter what a player wears on the field in your opinion?

“I agree with everything Charles says except for that one. The greatest share is your effort and your talent and the work that you put in. But, as I said at the beginning, as Jack Harbaugh said, you are with whom you associate, and to take that a step further let’s associate ourselves with the most evolved human beings in the world if we are with whom we associate and also the highest level companies, brands, products.

“So, that just goes along with our principles that we have, to be associated with greatness. And to think about having Michael Jordan sharing a sideline with us, to think about being the only team--football team--and that’s the University of Michigan that’s Jordan, to have that iconic logo sharing a uniform, we’re very, very proud of that. You asked me the question and I’m proud. We’re proud.”

Nike likes to do special uniforms. Is there any wiggle room for you in this with this association to do something different?

“Well, we’ll definitely keep an open mind on it. You know, as I said, they hit it out of the park here and everything that they have done up to this point has been hitting it out of the park and knocking our socks off, so definitely going to keep an open mind to what their thoughts are and what their ideas are without question. Haven’t decided anything. Not going to change the uniform design at this time, but I stand open to their ideas because, you know, some people just think of things better than what other people do. And they obviously do a tremendous job, so we’ll definitely keep an open mind.”

I mean for a one-off.

“We’ll keep an open mind. Sure, I’ll keep an open mind. Be dumb not to.”

[After THE JUMP: all the world’s a team]

via Michigan's new apparel site, which also has many detail shots

Michigan officially unveiled their new Jordan brand football uniforms in a totally understated setting this afternoon, and for the most part little has changed except the logo. This is good, especially if you're a fan of the all-white road uniforms. I count myself among that number, and so does Jim Harbaugh:

Harbaugh says the white pants on the road will be a permanent thing. He's a fan of that.

— Nick Baumgardner (@nickbaumgardner) August 2, 2016

Nike did make a few minor alterations. The number font is new, which you can see in both the '4' on the home uniform and the '2' on the road. The road uniforms now feature two sleeve stripes (late 80s/mid 90s style) instead of the three they wore last year [edit: my mistake, it's still three stripes—the bottom one was hard to see] and the sleeve numbers have moved from the side to the top of the shoulder. The rest is the same, and mercifully clean, too—I was worried the Jumpman logo would be too large, and that's not at all the case.

There is one major change, and it's to the most legendary aspect of the uniform:

Those are matte helmets. Michigan spokesman says the plan is to wear those this season. That's new. pic.twitter.com/5taVBAjmWs

— Nick Baumgardner (@nickbaumgardner) August 2, 2016

I'm ambivalent about the paint style of the helmet, but I might be in the minority there.

I'll hold off on diving into color analysis—at first glance, both the maize and blue look a little darker than past years—until we get some photos in normal lighting.

[Fuller/MGoBlog]

It’s hard to pick out when it really came into focus. It might have been when I heard that the line to get in went from the front of M-Den to near Angell Hall. It could have been when I looked down State Street to see where the end of said line was and saw only a street so full of people that the line was indistinguishable and the people stretched as far back as I could see. Maybe it was when a group of five or six people dove to the sidewalk about three feet to my right, and what I thought was an insane overreaction to someone cutting the line was just a bunch of people willing to sustain concrete burns for their shot at grabbing the hat Jim Harbaugh threw into the crowd. The setting was familiar, the logos were familiar, but the environment was completely different than anything that Michigan fans have ever seen. This was no mere apparel release event. This was unmistakably a Harbaugh-led party.

Harbaugh’s a man who hates comparing people. If you ask him to compare players he just won’t do it, and his reasoning is solid: compare one person to another and one necessarily gets diminished. Yet there we were, on a humid summer evening in Ann Arbor weeks before students get back in town, crammed so close that you know whether someone’s wearing a fragrance or whether they’re just fragrant, listening to Jim Harbaugh talk about how this is what the street will look when Michigan wins a national title. At some point he must have surveyed the college football landscape and decided that it was fine to start talking about where he thinks his team stacks up relative to the rest of the country.

The program’s expectations are different now, and the fanbase’s zealousness reflects that. They’re as high as they’ve ever been; there’s a gap the size of Tacopants between expectations from a decade ago and expectations today. Events like last night’s reinforce what seems to be the program’s theme and carefully curated direction: on the surface, everything old is new again. Then there’s something extra beyond the old “everything” that’s momentarily disorienting and refreshingly different.

The last time Michigan switched apparel companies they had just hired a new head football coach whose spread offense gashed the most firmly held beliefs of some subsets of the fanbase as well as it did defenses. This time around Michigan’s new head football coach is in his second year on campus, and the freshest memory of his tenure is the saccharine success of Michigan in the Citrus Bowl. People didn’t line up last night just to buy new clothes. They lined up because this was an opportunity to get a free ticket for the 11:59 PM hype train.

Signing on with Nike and getting outfitted not just with the swoosh but in Jordan Brand apparel is new and different and plays to the soft spot of most people associated with Michigan. You don’t go to a school or become a fan of a school where you hear about the “Michigan Difference” every 20 minutes and walk away feeling like blending into the pack is a lovely place to be. People wanted something different, but they weren’t interested in change for the sake of change. The reason to switch could have been as straightforward as Harbaugh’s review of his appearance in a rap video: the cool kids liked it. But that wasn’t enough for Jim Hackett and company. They found a way to get Jordan Brand looped into the deal, and they found a way to take the Jumpman logo, a logo that resonated with people as being a cut above, and get that stitched onto Michigan’s football jerseys.

In isolation, the switch to Nike and Jordan may not have been enticing enough to start an honest to goodness block party, but the excitement certainly would have been high enough to get something of a line to form to buy the new stuff when it came out. Then Michigan won 10 games, including a demolition of an SEC team whose defense was supposed to be murderous. Then Harbaugh started talking about setting goals that are so high others will laugh at you. Then he stopped talking about the process of getting to know his team and started dropping “national championship” here and there.

Real, authentic excitement is easy to derive from the comfort of seeing things you’re used to while feeling a sense of optimism about what’s to come, a belief that familiarity doesn’t have to mean a stagnant future but can be an element of something entirely new. Harbaugh found a way to do what the old guard has wanted for over two decades: resurrect Schembechler football. Harbaugh being Harbaugh, he then took it and twisted it into something that only looked like the kind of football that was played on Tartan Turf but attacked in a different and complex way, a way that defensive coordinators really could have used all those years between Schembechler and Harbaugh to prepare for. He took what was the ceiling of the old guard’s aspirations--to win a Big Ten title--and tore the roof off. The new expectation is that Michigan can compete not only in their conference but with anyone across the country. That this is being hammered on publicly by the head coach puts Michigan in rarefied air. Everything looks and feels familiar but elevated, and on Sunday night people couldn’t wait to drape themselves in the zeitgeist.