Shamrock Series ’18 – Nope.

“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

Christ on a cracker, folks. These are a monstrosity.

It’s been over an hour since the Tweet That Will Live in Infamy, so I’m sure someone else has already finished a blow-by-blow analysis of every infinitesimal, shitty detail of these rags.

We would be remiss, however, if we didn’t acknowledge that the entire concept of these jerseys, the essential idea of them, is absolutely putrid. There have now been nine iterations of the Shamrock Series uniforms, with a significant spread in terms of quality of design. Some, like the 2013 Arizona State variants, are strong enough to be adopted as an outright alternate. Others, like the babyshit green jerseys worn against Army in 2016, were not. But what they shared was a seemingly genuine desire to engage with an aspect of what makes Notre Dame great or unique, and express that concept in a tangible way.

When you paint the helmets black and put pinstripes on the sleeves, you’re not doing that. Letting the identity of the New York Yankees have this much sway over the design is bizarre – no other Shamrock Series uniform was influenced by the physical location of the venue to this extent. When the Irish played at Fenway, they wore a bright green, which you could certainly construe as an homage to the Green Monster. But Notre Dame athletics constantly wear a million different shades of green, across all their various sports. The design was a riff on an existing aspect of Notre Dame’s identity, not a weird and frankly inexplicable collision of two organizations with no shared history.

The actual design of these uniforms is already poorly thought-out (what is that hiding in the dot on the helmet? Ah, yes, it appears to be an ND monogram, I knew these binoculars would come in handy), lazy (that’s correct boss, we’ve got this box of extra pinstripe sleeves that the Yankees were gonna throw out, but I’ve got good news), and aesthetically bankrupt (the helmet is black. You know, like the Yankees!). But the real crime is that the base concept is so devoid of engagement with what ought to have been the most important sources of inspiration – the school, and the team that has to don these ridiculous clown suits and try to play competent football for sixty minutes.

Bad dog, Under Armour. No treat.