Summary: The football team’s gold bowl-game helmets were a fun discussion point for the end of the season, but hopefully it won’t inspire uniform changes run amok.

By now, you’ve probably seen the new gold helmets the football team wore in its bowl game earlier this month — with an eagle’s eyes on the front and a giant “K” on the back. In fact, we might be the last people on campus who haven’t rendered an opinion on them, so for the record, while they’re undoubtedly creative, the law of diminishing returns suggests they shouldn’t see the light of day too often.

Kent State is actually behind the times when it comes to the latest college football uniform trend: special one-off jersey and helmet designs. They give the schools media attention, but it costs money when the regular blue ones would have been perfectly fine. For an athletic department that already relies on hundreds of dollars from each student’s tuition in order to stay financially afloat, this isn’t a trend we’d like our team to follow.

The epitome of uniform excess is the University of Oregon, whose close relationship with nearby apparel giant Nike has led to the Ducks football team looking at least slightly different every single week. We much prefer how the Flashes are a rare Nike school that keeps it simple: blue jerseys for home games, white jerseys for road trips and a single blue helmet with the Kent State logo. Anything more than that is unnecessary and wasteful.

That said, the gold helmets are defendable: departing head coach Darrell Hazell had promised them to his players if they made it to a bowl game, the program’s first in 40 years. Getting to wear a special new helmet as a reward for the Flashes’ best season in our lifetimes isn’t unreasonable, as long as it doesn’t grow into a compulsive habit of introducing new uniforms for every game.

The above editorial is the consensus opinion of the Daily Kent Stater editorial board.