These Air Force Uniforms Honoring The Tuskegee Airmen Might Be The Best College Football Unis In History

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Air Force football has sported a variety of alternate uniforms over the years, but they just released a design that is so fresh, so clean, so detailed that, no joke, I’m willing to claim they’re the best college football uniform design that I’ve ever seen — and that’s certainly saying something given iconic looks we’ve witnessed teams wearing.

Known as the “2020 Air Power Legacy Series uniform,” these Air Force football threads are a perfect blend of color scheme and simplicity, yet still accounting for a tremendous amount of detail with all the bells and whistles. And with the Falcons wearing these uniforms during their home game against Navy on October 3 in Falcon Stadium, you can bet the players will be fired up sporting them while running onto the gridiron. Just take a look below at the near flawless design.

And, as I mentioned above, Air Force Football didn’t spare any detail with these, with the design paying tribute to the Tuskegee Airmen, who were the first black military aviators in the U.S. Army Air Corps (a precursor to the Air Force) which flew more than 15,000 individual sorties in Europe and North Africa during World War II. You can see the incredible depth of the design below.

While the entire uniform gets an A+ rating, the fact that there’s four variations of the helmet — with the four squadron patches for the 99th, 100th, 301st and 302nd as options — is incredible, and shows how much thought went into the Air Force football design. You can see some info below behind the inspiration for the unis.

Per Air Force Football’s official website:

The uniform is gray with black lettering. The chrome base gray helmet features the P-51 aircraft flown by the Tuskegee Airmen with signature red tails and nose that helped identify the squadron. The helmet features the four squadron patches for the 99th, 100th, 301st and 302nd. The pants feature an authentic stenciled information graphic on the side. The custom nameplate on the jersey says Red Tails, inspired by hand-lettered names painted on the side of the P-51 aircraft.

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The Tuskegee Airmen were a group of African-American pilots from the U.S. Army Air Corps commissioned by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in September 1940. The pilots began their training at Moton Field in Tuskegee, Alabama. More than 900 pilots graduated from the program and more than 350 served in active duty as fighter pilots.

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In early 1944, the 99th was joined by the 100th, 301st and 302nd to form the 332nd Fighter Group. They were the only African-American fighter group in the Army Air Corps and the only group to have four squadrons instead of three. Assigned the color red for identification purposes, the 332nd became known as the Red Tails and Red Tail Angels for the success escorting bombers into enemy territory.

The 332nd was credited with shooting down 12 German planes in two days in January 1944, flying more than 15,000 sorties and shooting down 112 enemy planes total. The unit earned 96 Distinguished Flying Crosses and three Distinguished Unit Citations. The success of the Tuskegee Airmen helped lay the groundwork for the civil rights movement and influenced President Harry Truman’s decision to desegregate the armed forces in 1948.

Game-worn helmets and jerseys will be auctioned off at the end of the 2020-21 college football season, with 100 percent of proceeds going to the support of cadet-athletes — so you can actually snag one of these for yourself in a few months.

Good stuff all around, so now we’ll have to wait and see if Air Force football plays as good as they look when they don these threads in a couple weeks.

(H/T The Big Lead)