Tennessee's Newest Smokey Grey Uniform Has Been Unveiled and They Massacred My Boy
This is a sad day. This is a bad day.
Tennessee had one of the best uniforms in college football with its original Smokey Grey set under Nike. The Smokey Mountains overlay on the helmet, nothing too crazy going on with the jerseys — it was perfect.
Jonathan Bachman. Getty Images.Then a few years ago, UT and Nike started getting cute. They started debuting a new version of the Smokey Greys every season and most of them were fine, but we were messing with perfection. Last season's was some sort of Davy Crockett/U.S. military mashup, 2024's was a state pride thing, so on and so forth. I see what they were going for.
Tim Gangloff. Shutterstock Images.
Jacob Kupferman. Getty Images.But if you're going to be cute, you better get it right. And in Tennessee's first season back with Adidas, they missed the mark badly.
This year's uniform is honoring General Robert Neyland, who first became Tennessee's head coach in 1926. That's all well and good, we love the General. But someone should have put a stop to this.

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The helmet is heinous. Putting a stadium on a jersey looks weird. The pants are white for some reason. General Neyland would roll over in his grave if he saw the Tennessee Volunteers take the field wearing this garbage.
And maybe my biggest problem with the whole thing is the Vols will be wearing these in a huge game against Auburn. The last three years, the Smokey Greys had been worn against Group of Five or FCS teams in games nobody outside Tennessee watched. But now that we have the worst of the bunch, we're gonna roll them out there in an SEC game again?!
I had been so pleasantly surprised with the Adidas rollout, too. Pretty much everything had been great. And now we get this.