Coachwear is really an underexplored and underappreciated aspect of the whole sporting experience. And I say this as someone who is generally pretty ignorant of fashion in general (as my five total pairs of t-shirts and single polo shirt that I got for Christmas eight years ago will attest), but it's weird and kind of fascinating how much time and effort we put into decoding the messages and intent behind what the coaches of our favorite sports teams wear on a regular basis.
This hits across virtually every sport, because all of them have some kind of weird code or standard for what's acceptable or expected for coaches to wear, even though we live in the year two thousand and eighteen, so presumably at this point in the plot we should've all given up our clothes for monochromatic unitards with different lapel pins that designate which part of the spaceship we work in.
NHL coaches are all dressed in boardroom suits with a power tie, looking every bit like a guy who really, really wants you to take his business card, NFL coaches love the coquettish, 4/5ths zipped up team-branded windbreaker with slacks and matching baseball hat look (unless you're Bill Belichick or a coach trying to emulate him), and speaking of baseball, managers in the MLB all wear uniforms for some damn reason that apparently no one can adequately explain.
You would think that college football, being the sport where presumably you could just go ahead and do whatever and whenever, given that's it's a college environment, but nope: if your coach has a brand then so do the other 500 assistants and personnel on staff. Which is fine! I mean, I get it. If Urban wants everyone wearing a scarlet shirt and tan khakis, then by God you had better buy fifteen pairs of each and keep half of them in your office for emergencies.
In fact, what got me thinking about all of this is the fact that Ohio State has such a long history building altars to coaches on the basis of their sweet threads: hell, we even identify one of the best coaches in program history primarily by his incessant use of a dorky sleeveless sweater. But it's not just Jim Tressel, it's Woody Hayes' glasses, hat, and short-sleeved dress shirt combo and of course, the absolutely fantastic suit and fedora (cue thousands of dorks yelling "IT'S A TRILBY" into the ether) ensemble that we most associate with this week's 87 years-young birthday boy, Earle Bruce.
Let's examine his classic power attire, which he didn't start to wear until towards the end of his tenure at Ohio State:
Click the image for a full sized version you can cut out!
For Earle Bruce, this was kind of a brilliant concoction. Seriously, imagine being this guy. Your mentor just got fired at the tail end of a legendary career for punching a dude in the gob. Not only do you now have to take over for one of the greatest coaches in history, but you also have to put your stamp on a program that demands both change and consistency.
Probably the only person in the universe who can relate to how lonely that can be in Columbus is Luke Fickell, and even he wasn't really saddled with the same kind of expectations that Bruce labored under (especially given that Bruce had already had head coaching experience at Iowa State).
It didn't always go smoothly. Bruce is famous for doing pretty well against Michigan and pretty well against everybody else, and not a whole lot better than that. Not being the easiest coach for administration to work with can be ignored if you're winning, but three Ls per year didn't help Bruce's case and neither did his unabashed love for the ponies. Losing badly to Indiana at home in 1987 was the final straw, and he was out shortly thereafter.
Most of the time Earle Bruce coached in a pretty "meh" golf shirt, slacks, and baseball hat, but when you're about to get fired, you might as well go out with a bang.
So Earle went old school. Hat, suit jacket and tie, polished shoes, the whole thing. I respect the hell out of that, not just because the memory of Earle Bruce showing up to the sidelines wearing a suit is a fading in a sea of football coaches in khakis and windbreakers, but also because he knew that in that moment wanted to make a statement that there was more to him than what fans or administration thought of him.
So he went out a winner, and more importantly, a winner that looked cool as hell.
It takes guts to break out of the mold and try something new, even with something as silly as the clothes that you wear, which is why I would hope that the likes of Urban Meyer might have the same kind of intestinal fortitude that his mentor had when facing a pink slip. Take off the polo, maybe. Try on a smoking jacket, or a fez, or maybe a kilt with a scarlet and gray tartan. Whatever!
Have fun with it, because if players get alternate uniforms, then dammit, so should the coaches. You don't have to look like Bob Huggins on a regular basis, but it's worth a couple of games a year to get goofy, and like Earle, you never know which game might be your last.
