Oklahoma State’s Veterans Day Uniforms Didn’t Happen Overnight

STILLWATER — Sunday’s unveiling of the military appreciation uniforms the Cowboys will wear this weekend was the culmination of a couple of years’ of work.

Justin Williams, Oklahoma State’s director of football equipment operations, worked with Nike, the OSU ROTC and Folds of Honor to complete the look. Williams said it took “every bit of a couple of years” to get it all together.

The team found out Sunday in the theater room in the west end zone of Boone Pickens Stadium. The reveal video got played for the Cowboys, and Brock Martin said when uniform finally came into full focus the room started going nuts.

“The uniforms are so nice,” Chuba Hubbard said. “We were freaking out in here. The cause, we’re trying to pay support to our veterans and stuff like that. They do a lot for us, and that goes over a lot of people’s heads. So, just to be able to wear a uniform and play for them show that we care about them and we’re thankful for it. It’s an honor.”

Williams said he gets crushed for not having enough orange, but there is special meaning to the gray with this look. The uniform is based off an F-117 Nighthawk, a stealth aircraft. Lockheed’s Skunk Works Division found the best way to avoid visual detection in the daylight was a paint scheme using different shades of gray.

“I do (like the gray), and I know the guys love the gray,” Williams said. “From my standpoint, it’s a lot easier for me to like it because I see how excited they are to wear it. For this purpose, absolutely the gray was a perfect touch. It’s based off of an F-117 Nighthawk, a stealth plane. So they wanted that stealth, sleek look. That really fit with the uniform after it was explained how they went about presenting it.”

Pistols Firing Podcast host Carson Cunningham has long been hollering for a black-gray-black combination, a request Williams was familiar with. With the uniform being in the works for so long, Williams knew Carson would eventually get what he sought after, but only after the Cowboys wore black-gray-gray against McNeese.

“Obviously we knew this was coming, so we wore the black-gray-gray again,” Williams said. “I saw Cunningham at Chanel 5 was wanting the black-gray-black. We kinda knew that this was on the way, so we figured he’d be happy by the end of it.”

Williams said they didn’t want to go too over the top with the look and step on the toes of Army, Navy and Air Force for any uniforms they do. So the subtly of it was important.

“Respectful, but nothing off the wall, nothing outside the box,” Williams said. “Army and Navy and those teams, let them have that. The purpose was to recognize our ROTC program, the history that we have with that and keep it very much respectful and very clean and traditional, as well.”