There are far more worrisome matters these days than the mutiny by sports apparel companies over traditional college football colors. But, really: Dressing Notre Dame’s gridders in pinstriped Yankee baseball pants and navy blue helmets?! This may be another potentially touchy topic that probably should he avoided on Thanksgiving weekend. But won’t be here.

I quote Paul Lukas, who runs the web site Uni-Watch (“The obsessive study of athletic aesthetics”), in judging that Notre Dame fashion statement “about as silly as you’d expect.” More idiotic is how such unnatural apparel trends have become so common.

I acknowledge a curmudgeonly mien regarding this subject. And a personal one. To see the lads representing my alma mater, the University of Missouri, tromping around this season in white helmets one week, yellow the next, is an abomination. The school colors are black and gold and, for something like 50 years, the conventional garb was black helmet (with three distinctive stripes), black shirt (white on the road), gold pants.

Not only stylish, but appropriate. An immutable look that was instantly identifiable to the Mizzou tribe of alumni and fans—and to college football observers in general. Then Nike got its grubby capitalistic hands on the operation and replaced historical hues with shades of mediocrity. Once Nike co-founder Phil Knight initiated a garish rotation of togs for players at his school, the University of Oregon, a few seasons ago, we have been doomed to counterintuitive attire that, in effect, creates mystery teams. Not to mention candidates for those old Mr. Blackwell worst-dressed lists.

This cross-pollination of pigments is gripping all sports, and Nike isn’t the only perpetrator among the outfitters. There is a frenzy over “alternate uniforms” in which teams change clothes from week-to-week, game-to-game, resulting in moving targets of sartorial insignificance.

One major trend is that, while black is being erased from teams that traditionally have worn black, there simultaneously is a preoccupation of dressing those whose school colors are not black in black—at least part of the time: Northwestern (purple and white) in black. Florida State (garnet and gold) in black. Nebraska (scarlet and cream) in black. Iowa State (cardinal and gold) in black. Tulane (green and blue) in black. Temple (cherry and white) in black. North Carolina State (red and white) in black. Baylor (green and gold) in black. And on and on.

The nonsensical reasoning for this misapplication of colors—the excuse, constructed out of whole cloth by Missouri, among others—is a “branding” supposedly meant to establish a team’s widespread identity among spectators and potential recruits. When, in fact, it does the opposite.

My Missouri guys—Who are those fellows and where are they from?—have worn a different uniform in each of their 12 games this season, such a dizzying search for a hallmark that the Columbia Missourian, the city newspaper operated by the university’s elite Journalism School, sought out a professor from New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology for insight.

Tim Scott, the FIT academic and consultant to such high-tone clothing giants as Ralph Lauren, found some of the uniforms “well-coordinated,” some “a bit ordinary,” some “not so traditional,” and the black pants used in one combination to “look almost like women’s workout pants…”

That’s branding? Since college rosters turn over quickly—with no player around for more than four years—the uniform is what customarily served as the constant for spectators. Ever since we moved past the ancient Olympians competing in their birthday suits, there has been a real visual aspect to sports duds, as evidenced by the many listings—however subjective—of the most attractive and ugliest. Notice: Among the regularly cited favorites are those essentially unchanged over the decades: Alabama’s threads. Michigan’s. Penn State’s. USC’s. UCLA’s.

Just last week, Uni-Watch’s Lukas referenced the annual USC-UCLA game, “which once again found the Bruins and Trojans going color vs. color, to spectacular effect,” UCLA in its powder blue and gold and USC in cardinal and gold, an eye-catching (and familiar) corrective to the weird Notre Dame/Yankee laundry.

Spare us the chromophobia of gaudy, illogical raiment. (They wear their welcome thin. Instantly.) Stick with the hand-me-down styles and official colors of past generations. Custom over costume.