Nike "employee" lashes out over Duck uniform critics
So the Oregon Duck football team isn’t exactly renowned for sticking with clean and classic uniforms for the sake of tradition – rather they have partnered up with Nike (an Oregon company, essentially born out of the UO track team) to push the envelope in variety and, ah, taste. My take – love the helmet, stop screwing with the rest. All you need is one away uniform (I like the all whites), and one home (dark green with black). Done. For the latest, see my other post, but here’s a photo to given you a sense for the “variety”:
However that’s just background. There’s an entire group blog focused on developments in the world of sports uniforms (seriously) – UniWatchBlog.com. They put up a few posts from time to time (rightfully) taking pot shots at my beloved college football team’s sense of style, and got rewarded with the by now tried-and-trued “2nd dumbest thing a company can do to respond to bloggers” (just behind sending a cease & desist): an apparent Nike employee troll appeared in the site comments and tried to anonymously rip on the blog. Fanblogs has a summary, or read the original on UniWatchBlog.
I highly doubt this was any kind of officially sanctioned commenting – probably someone from Nike just got pissed and decided to have at the bloggers with some vigilante justice, at least in their minds. But I agree with Kevin at Fanblogs – best way forward here for Nike is to embrace their critics, show they can take some shots with good nature, and send the UniWatch guys some personalized Duck jerseys.
tags: uniwatchblog, fanblogs, unifroms, oregon+ducks, goducks, nike, oregon
4 Comments
i particularly like that the Uniwatchblog added a “nike visitors” log to their site, guess they were able to track the corp IP address :)
That I thought was the perfect way to respond. It’s polite, but good for a laugh. :-)
what most people do not understand is that as a recruiting tool the new uniforms are amazing. i mean sports are going to change, and talking about how it should be or has been is not going to change that.
Mason – wow old post comes to life! :) I agree about the recruiting value of the uniforms, in that regards they have been a raging success. My personal taste is towarda the more traditional (maybe joey harrington era) duck unis though. On the discussions I think it's great to debate changes to sport like this- the point on the post above was a nike employee (who designs the duck unis in question) anon commenting and flaming the critics. That was just poor form.