For a fistful of dollars, will the bad guys wear black in titanic B1G clash?

It's funny how Oregon gets dissed as "the Nike school," when most of the top programs in college football are Nike schools. Ohio State, Alabama, Georgia, LSU, Clemson and Texas are all Nike schools. In the Big Ten, Penn State, Illinois, Iowa, Michigan State, Minnesota, Purdue, Rutgers and USC wear Nike gear and shoes.

Indiana, Miami, Texas A&M and Washington wear Adidas. Notre Dame wears Under Armour. So there's a good chance the 2026 National Championship will be a clash of uniform giants and sponsorships.

Every jersey variation and one-off uniform combination means big money in apparel sales, and the weekly uniform reveal has become a big deal in both brand promotion and recruiting.

So it got massive attention when the Ohio State Buckeyes announced they're wearing an updated version of their fierce, aggressive-looking scarlet-on-black jerseys, helmets and pants for one game next year, ominously named the "Tunnel Vision" uniform.

It's an alternate jersey, a throwback set especially suited for night games, designed to rev up the crowd. Problem is, the Buckeyes rarely get night games. As holders of the Big Ten television rights, the Fox network regularly snatches up OSU games for the "Big Noon" slot, particularly epic showdowns like the rivalry game with That Team Up North and the much-anticipated opener with Texas, No. 1 in many of the preseason polls.

UO vs. OSU promises drama, but unlikely to produce epic uniform clash

Oregon travels to Ohio State for a regular season contest on Saturday November 7. If the two schools, achieve the massive expectations for each this season, that's expected to be a candidate for this year's Game of the Century, a matchup of Top Five teams that will figure heavily in playoff seeding and the Big Ten race.

It's also a contrast of styles, the Blue Blood Buckeyes with nine national championships and what is ordinarily a very traditional uniform look with the Scarlet and Gray, complete with the oak-leaf decals on the helmets, versus the New Blood Ducks and their "10,000 uniforms, zero national championships."

Oregon prides itself on thumbing its nose at tradition, while the Buckeyes fans justifiably revel in theirs. Three years into conference expansion, it's shaping up to become one of the defining rivalries in college football. The clash of image and styles merely makes it juicier, and the prospect of the Buckeyes' innovative variation pitted against whatever new look Oregon might bring to the game is something uniform fashion-conscious fans relish.

Trouble is, the uniform part of the story probably won't materialize. The Buckeyes have played just 19 night games over the last five years, and typically those have included milquetoast matchups like Ohio, Western Michigan and UCLA.

Even if the UO-OSU tilt materializes as a Dante Moore vs. Julian Sayin blockbuster, No. 1 versus No. 2 with an amped-up capacity crowd and Josh Pate, Joel Klatt, ESPN GameDay and the Big Noon Crew all in attendance, it's astronomically unlikely the game sneaks past Fox to make it to prime time and the under-the-lights setting.

Even for that to happen, Oregon has to get by Boise State, Oklahoma State, USC, UCLA, Nebraska and Illinois without a hiccup. The Ducks have to live up to their preseason hype for the Ohio State game to truly be a big deal, no matter which uniform set the teams are wearing.

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