When the PAC-12 Conference began falling apart last year, Oregon and Washington headed to the Big Ten, Arizona, Arizona State and Utah quickly followed Colorado to the Big 12. A month later, California and Stanford completed a move to the ACC, leaving OSU and WSU behind. Even saying Cal and Stanford and ACC in the same sentence is still a little weird, and yet, such is the state of college football in 2024. So the venerable “Atlantic Coast Conference” is now semi-jokingly referred to as the “All Coasts Conference,” now that Stanford and Cal are its newest members.
Tonight, Stanford will play its first ACC game against Syracuse, and to mark the occasion, they’ll do so in a new red helmet.
They showed off the new bucket in a hype video yesterday:
A new looking lid for our @ACCFootball debut 🔴#GoStanford pic.twitter.com/miWx1Ip2Z3
— Stanford Football (@StanfordFball) September 19, 2024
Aside from the leather helmet era, Stanford had worn white helmets for most of its existence. It wasn’t until the BFBS trend finally caught up with them that the introduced their first non-white helmet, wearing a black bucket for a few select games beginning in 2011. That helmet was matte with a cardinal “S” and two red stripes. They changed up the decal 2015, adding a white tree within the “S” logo. The Cardinal would change the decal once again, in 2018 (that helmet was stripeless — in 2019 they added back a solid red stripes).
But those black helmets would only be worn for one game a year; the remaining games the Cardinal played all featured white lids.
Until 2023. For the first time since the leather helmet era, Stanford debuted a red helmet which was worn for one game last season, against Notre Dame. That helmet featured a matte finish and “Stanford” in white script on the side.
Now that Stanford has joined the ACC, they will inaugurate their first Conference game in the new red helmet shown in the video above. It’s the same satin finish as on their 2023 helmet, but the team has removed the script “Stanford” and replaced it with their classic “S-Tree” logo. The 2023 helmet had one solid white stripe, while the 2024 version has white/red/white stripes running from front to back.
Let’s take a closer look:
As you can see, aside from the aforementioned white/red/white stripes and “S-Tree” logo, the cage is white, and the nose bumper reads “CARDINAL” in red block letters. It, too, has a satin finish, as the 2023 version had.
The rear features the team’s new “ACC” logo decal, along with white numbers on either side of the stripes. The white neck bumper has “STANFORD” in red letters.
When the Cardinal debuted their red helmets against Notre Dame last year, that was a home game for Stanford, so they had a red/red/white uniform combo:
Tonight’s game is at Syracuse, and assuming Stanford will be in their normal road white jersey/pants, this will be the first time ever the team will wear a red helmet over white shirts and britches.
I am a pretty big fan of satin-finish helmets, largely because they usually “maintain” their color no matter the lighting conditions, and in theory, allow teams to better color-match (think the Minnesota Vikings who finally got their purples to match a couple years back). Of course, if Stanford is wearing a white jersey and pants, the satin red finish won’t matter as much, but if you look at the photo above, even a satin finish is affected by night game lighting, although not nearly to the extent of a glossy or metallic helmet.
Stanford — except for their yearly BFBS game — have very traditional uniforms, so it’ll be nice to see them change things up a bit with the red bucket. Last year they swapped decals and wore a black cage with their BFBS uniforms for one game. We’ll have to see if they do that again this season.
But for tonight, let’s all enjoy the new helmet and uni combo.
Your thoughts on the new helmet?
You called Stanford “Cal” in this article? You are going to get all kinds of heat for that.
Quick little bolt of rage went through me when I saw this typo! Just thinking about mixing up Cal with anything red gives me the shivers lol
Go Bears!
Ey-yi-yi! Can’t believe I didn’t catch that.
Now fixed.
Typo. Stanford is playing tonight, not Cal.
I loved the script helmet, wish they would have used that more.
It’s iconic but I’ve never REALLY loved the redwood tree logo. I know “El Palo Alto” was a redwood tree of course but the Stanford campus is much more about palm trees than redwoods.
Side Note: Syracuse’s first year coach Fran Brown, “Gets it.”
The Orange will continue to strictly wear their traditional home/away uniforms for the foreseeable future.
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Couldn’t agree more on the satin finish for helmets. It just helps so much with matching the helmet with the jersey. Last nights Jets game was brutal with their mismatched green helmets and jerseys.
Came here to say this. When the helmet color matches the jersey color, a satin finish looks much better with today’s more matte looking jersey fabrics than the super reflective/shiny finish helmets do.
I like that Stanford is adding a second stripe to the helmet. I watched the Stanford-ND game last year and Stanford looked more like Alabama than Stanford. (Not in ability obviously.) Just look at #86 in the background of the photo from that game above and tell me you don’t see Bama.
I think the Jets’ shiny helmets may have worked better 15-20 years ago when the stretchy parts of the jerseys (basically just the shoulder areas and down the sides – see the Packers, who still use the old style) were a shiny material. As it stands, I wish the Jets would use a white helmet with the green jerseys and only use the shiny green helmet with the white jerseys. (The less said of the black uniforms the better. Completely unnecessary.) It’s a great looking helmet in a vacuum but doesn’t work well with the green jerseys.
These are an alternate lid I can go with. Should look pretty good on TV.
As someone who really dislikes white-over-white football uniforms, if they’re adding a Cardinal helmet, here’s hoping they bring back a version of the cardinal pants they wore in the 2000s as well to go with it. (Not necessarily with the black trim/stripes they had at the time…but cardinal/white/cardinal would look SOOO much better then cardinal/white/white.)
Ditto on Curt’s thoughts on adding cardinal pants with the red/white/red striping to complement the new helmet — that would make a really sharp looking road kit.
The helmet is great, especially with the tri-stripe pattern, and that will at least entice me to peek in on the Stanford-Syracuse game during Illini-Husker commercial breaks.
This game might be a color palette special since Syracuse will be going orange -blue-orange.
What in heck is bfbs I’m so confused of what u are saying, or are u saying black uniforms or what.