Yes, the 1988 NCAA champs are also the only KU team ever to put on yellow uniforms.
Let’s backtrack a minute. Two years earlier, at the NCAA Final Four in Dallas, coach Larry Brown opted to bring out crimson uniforms for the semifinal game against Duke.
This was the most talented team in Brown’s five-year tenure on Mount Oread, but after the Blue Devils won he vowed he would never use red uniforms again. Brown unquestionably was the most superstitious coach in KU’s storied history.
So when the Jayhawks’ uniform outfitter offered to provide yellow togs — the color of the Jayhawks’ beak, get it? — prior to the 1987-88 season, Brown was amenable. He thought they looked snazzy. Unfortunately, he hadn’t considered a critical ramification that I’ll get to momentarily.
Brown liked the yellow duds so much he decided not to wait until the postseason. He decided to debut them in an early December road game against Western Carolina. Western Carolina??? In contemporary times, Kansas would play on the moon before it traveled to a mid-major gym, but that was then.
It was a home-and-home deal. The Catamounts came to Lawrence during the 1985-86 season, and KU agreed to go to Cullowhee, N.C., the next year to inaugurate the school’s new arena. However, prior commitments forced a postponement until the following year.
So off the Jayhawks went, eventually arriving after a long flight to Asheville and a tedious drive to Cullowhee where they, without fanfare, took the floor in yellow uniforms. KU won, 68-63, despite surrendering 17 unanswered points in the late going.
Folks back in Kansas watching on television could have cared less about that late swoon, though. All they wanted to talk about were those yellow uniforms.
Why were they miffed? All you need to know is that the school Kansas has been playing forever in a border rivalry also wears yellow (although Missouri prefers to call it Old Gold … whatever that means).
Good thing there wasn’t e-mail in those days, or Brown’s computer would have locked up. But the office phone rang and rang, and the snail mail was copious. Brown realized he had no choice.
“They’ll never be seen again,” he said a couple of days later. “I like them, but they’re history.”
Brown was true to his word. The Jayhawks never wore yellow again that season, and they haven’t since.
