Michigan's not-quite-throwback weirdness

So the big marketing campaign Michigan's been building up toward the unveiling of some sort of throwback-type jersey for the mega-hyped Notre Dame night game has apparently been undone by some random MGoBlog reader perusing the M-Den's online catalog.

The link doesn't go anywhere, but the alternate text says all you need to know:

Ummmm ... wow. That's definitely ... uhhh ... different. It's also not really similar to any Michigan football jersey, like, ever. Brian Kelly mentioned a couple months back that Notre Dame would be wearing unis from the "Joe Kuharich era," aka 1959-62, and I think most of us assumed Michigan's would be yanked from roughly the same period. That is most definitely not the case.

The closest comparison to whatever that thing is would probably be the 1891 jerseys, which also had an alternate-stripe pattern on the sleeves but didn't have anything in the center and weren't blue. This seems like sort of a compilation of various throwback-ish items into one jersey, which is a weird way to do it (although maybe that was the only way to go since Michigan's all-time uniform spectrum basically includes just two tops: the super-old-school button-up sweaters and essentially the thing we have today).

Personally, I was hoping for a Gerald Ford-era varsity-style sweater with just a block M on the front, but I guess the NCAA requires the jersey number to be visible on the front of the uniform, which (IMO) is kinda lame and should be negotiable for throwback jerseys. Oh well ...

Anyway, I don't hate it. It seems weird, but anything would -- seriously, Michigan's home jerseys have been exactly the same (other than larger numbers and shorter sleeves) since before my grandfather was born. We know nothing else.

And remember, it could ALWAYS be worse: