Can anyone tell me how/when the tradition of wearing white jerseys got started for our home games????
an Ole Miss Grad was our equipment manager and didn't like any ohter color than WHITE. Just like the Ole Miss OLINEMAN on this years team. I think that's how it went.
This came from a sports information site, and what I was told as a student at LSU: "In a tradition dating back to the 1950's, LSU wears white jerseys for its home games, a rarity in college football. The NCAA would not allow this practice for more than a decade, requiring visiting teams to wear white from 1983-1994 and, according to the LSU media guide, "relegating the Tigers to don garish purple jerseys." The rule was lifted in 1995 but LSU could only resume its tradition if visiting teams agreed to wear dark colors at Tiger Stadium. If you look online you will find a lot of college uniform polls with our home whites ranked fairly high in most of them. If you are looking for origins, that might be harder to find out. Most agree that wearing white comes from the heat in the south during the football season, where white jerseys would give you the advantage. I was at LSU when we went back to wearing white at home, and it was a huge success. However, when I graduated some of the students were complaing about the Tigers wearing the same stuff all the time. I bet if we switched back to wearing purple at home, it wouldn't last for long. There will always be fans, students, and alumni that will want to keep the tradition going. I kind of like it because it is just another thing that seperates us from all other teams. And we do wear purple during the season, so they are not wearing only the whites. I always felt we should only wear purple jerseys when we are the home team in a stadium other than Death Valley (such as any SECCG or bowl), or when playing other Louisiana teams in Death Valley.
LSU began wearing the whites at home during Paul Dietzel's coaching tenure. Photos I have seen of Jimmy Taylor in an LSU uniform always have him in purple, but as the photo above shows by the time of Billy Cannon they were in white. Georgia Tech is the only other team that I know of that wears white at home. It was a tradition started during the Bobby Dodd era and resurrected in the early 90s when the NCAA stopped meddling. By the way, my father's 1949 LSU yearbook shows the Tigers wearing white helmets at home with gold jerseys, so there is a precedent for that bizarre look at the Independence Bowl several years ago.
I remember that like it was yesterday, the Independence Bowl, not the 40's (wasn't born yet). Georgia Tech is also cloudy on the issue of when they started wearing white at home. It seems they went through several differnet types of home jersey colors (gold, black, etc) before settling on white. If you do a search at google about the subject (LSU and Georgia Tech with white jerseys) you will find a ton of greatest college uniform polls, interesting college football facts pages, and college tradition web sites. Also, a long time ago a question was asked on this board about who started the "Death Valley" stadium name first . . . LSU or Clemson. At a So Carolina Gamecocks website (where they list all the LSU traditions and traditions of other SEC schools), they say that Clemson copied it from LSU. Now there is no love loss between So Car and Clemson, so it might be a biased view, but atleast that writer felt Clemson copied it from us and has been trying for years ot back it up with that "death valley rock story".
