Hey, Notre Dame has weird jerseys too!

Since I don't spend much of my precious free time in the abyss of places like NDNation, I was unaware that Notre Dame was also unveiling its throwback-ish jersey for the cleverly named "Under the Lights" game at the same time as Michigan's announcement Friday night.

The result (next to Michigan's jersey for comparison):

Not bad. I actually like both quite a bit except for one subtle-but-not-so-insignificant thing: WTF is up with the shoulder stripes? At first I thought it was Michigan's attempt to throw it way back and pay homage to the days when mustaches and fedoras were all the rage, but the out-of-place stripes on the ND jerseys lead me to believe there's some subliminal messaging going on here. (Message to Adidas: You don't need to be like Nike. In fact, we'd prefer it if you weren't. Kthx.)

I couldn't remember if I'd ever seen Notre Dame in a green-on-white uni before, but a quick Google image search turned up these familiar-looking duds from the Rick Mirer/Jerome Bettis era:

Question answered. The one noticeable change to the new unis (other than the excessive striping) is the helmet, which will have the old-school shamrock from back in the '60s -- apparently this is what Brian Kelly was referring to with his comment a couple months ago about the Joe Kuharich era.

And I don't think I mentioned this in my earlier jersey-mania posts, but Michigan will have small numbers on its helmets that seem to reference the same time period (there aren't very many pictures of the old Michigan helmets with numbers on the sides, so I'm not sure of the exact years).

Here's a side-by-side of the new and old:

Very cool.

So anyway ... other than whatever it is that's going on around the shoulder area on both unis, I have no complaints. Excitement meter: Full.