The undoubted global leader in Northwestern Wildcats paraphernalia per square foot is Campus Gear in Evanston, founded in 1992. When I walked in there in June 2019, really just hoping to get a Medill School of Journalism shirt to wear as an inside joke at a staff meeting, the first thing that struck me was that there was that much Northwestern apparel anywhere on Earth.

The second thing that struck me was this:

Short of transfer QB Hunter Johnson and his family, I couldn’t imagine who’d want a joint Northwestern-Clemson hat. A colleague pointed out anyone who’d want a Northwestern-Penn hat could surely afford two hats. The same must be true of Northwestern-Cal.

There are dozens of “House Divided” Northwestern-Other School hats available. Coworker and model Matt Brown and I took pictures of 25 of them, which is 25 more of these hats than we’d ever seen before involving any other schools. Still more are available online, and more are coming to the store in the months ahead.

What the hell?

I asked David Haghnaji, who opened this store in 1992 and another location on Central Avenue, right across from Ryan Field, in 2014. Why?

People asked for them. Ten years or so ago, Haghnaji noticed demand for hats that put Northwestern’s logo next to other Big Ten crests. Around the start of 2019, he expanded the business to non-Big Ten schools.

The target consumer “went to Stanford, and his son is going to Northwestern,” the store owner says. “He wants a hat that has both of them. Or they have kids that go to two schools, different ones.”

Campus Gear does not sell Northwestern-Stanford hats. Stanford declined to license its logo for use on the hats, apparently because it was concerned a Northwestern-Stanford hat would create the impression that the Cardinal considered Northwestern a rival.

“Stanford just came up and said that ‘we are not rivals and we don’t want that,’” Haghnaji said. The other schools that have declined to license the hats, per Haghnaji’s recounting, are Duke, North Carolina, and USC.

The store’s sold enough hats to keep ordering them. There’s a whole process.

The store gets in touch with a big hat company, either Zephyr or Top of the World, and the company works with licensing groups to get the logos.

Haghnaji acknowledges it’s not the “most feasible or best way” for him to spend money, but the hats do come off his shelves, going for $34.99 plus tax. Haghnaji’s ordered 2,000 of them over the years, and he tries to sell a few hundred before putting in a new order.

There is no way, I told Haghnaji, that the NU-Auburn hats sell.

“Yesterday, two people bought,” he said. A family with a Northwestern kid has a daughter heading off to Auburn, and they bought both of them.

The business is really just following a rule: Never underestimate the degree to which college sports fans will purchase virtually anything with their school’s logo on it.

“Southern people, when they see those, they have to have it. ‘Cause they probably have every other combination of any hat that Alabama has,” Haghnaji said. “They may not even have any interest in Northwestern, but they’re collectors of hats.”

(Full disclosure: This Pittsburgh-born blogger is now the proud owner of a Northwestern-Alabama hat.)

Haghnaji said the Northwestern-UCLA hat has become a top seller, among other Westerns.

“Mostly the California [schools], ‘cause there’s a lot of kids from California that come here, ‘cause it’s the furthest they get away from California,” he said.

At most schools, these hats wouldn’t sell. But they do at Northwestern, a school short on sports rivalries and high on disposable income.

It made sense for the hats to start in the Big Ten, because there’s no program in the conference that’s so repulsive to Northwestern that a Wildcat fan could never wear its logo. Someone at Northwestern might really, honestly want a Northwestern-Michigan hat.

“They call Illinois their rival,” Haghnaji said. “Even that is not really.”

Even so, when the store wants to get a logo license, it urges the hat companies to lean away from selling it to licensers as a rivalry thing. “When they apply for their license, don’t say that this is a rivalry hat,” Haghnaji said. “Because rivalry, some people only look at it for sports. But some schools, like Northwestern could be Harvard’s rival in MBA.”

Harvard dutifully licensed out its H to appear on one of these hats.

Here is our complete ranking of House Divided Northwestern hats by comedy.

Matt and I have ranked these items together. If we found them on the shelves, we modeled them for you. Scroll horizontally through each gallery to see them. We will escalate the shock factor for you as we proceed through this list. The funniest fits are at the bottom.

Group 7: Not surprising. Should’ve assumed this hat existed somewhere

Grid View Harvard.

NYU.

Cal. This one also plays as a “University of Northern California” hat.

Columbia.

Dartmouth.

Cornell.

Notre Dame.

Chicago, i.e. Chicago’s Big Ten Team.

UCLA.

MIT. It’s wild, but this hat cost $140,000.

Yale, but you could get away with pretending it’s BYU.

Group 6: America’s most hallowed universities, put together

Grid View Army.

Air Force.

Navy.

These hats are ideal for when you want to pay tribute to both the troops and the journalists who cheerlead them into war.

Group 5: Mildly surprising. But mainly just oozing Midwesternness

Grid View Wisconsin.

Penn State.

Purdue

Indiana.

Michigan State.



Minnesota.

Iowa.

Nebraska.

The store also has hats with the two truest Big Ten teams of all, with stock photos to reflect how seriously the rest of the Big Ten takes these institutions:

Grid View Maryland.

Rutgers.

Group 4: Bizarre. Niche items even among niche items

Grid View Miami (Ohio).

Kansas.

Group 3: Deeply unnatural

Grid View Miami.

Arizona.

Kentucky, for when one of your kids aced the ACT and the other didn’t, but you have to support both.

For when you want Bama, but only, like, halfway.

Baylor.

LSU.

Group 2: If the Outback Bowl were a hat

Grid View Auburn.

Tennessee.

In Outback Bowl tradition, these hats should be much more lopsided, but let’s move on.

Group 1: A Northwestern-Arizona State hat

If you own this hat, please send us an email so we can study you.