Football uniform reveals have become noted recently as big-time events for fanbases, but WSU football chose to go with an understated approach today when the Cougs dropped their new duds — likely because the redesign itself is subtle.

But don’t let that fool you. It’s definitely different.

Twitter was the chosen medium for the reveal, and it started with the all-crimson look that has become a popular choice for big games:

You’ll probably want to click the photos to see in greater detail, but even though they look substantially similar to what we already had, here’s what you notice right away about the differences:

There is no gray anywhere on the uniform — it’s gone from the pants and the shoulders and from the outline around the numbers. There are only two colors going on here: Crimson and white.

The Cougar logo is added to the pants.

Less easy to notice (unless you look at it next to an old photo) is that the numbers are bigger.

Then came the next set, which changed the top to the new white:

Same deal as before: Each part still has only two colors — crimson and white, no gray.*

*Kinda feeling like we’re trying to look like Alabama, and not really seeing why this was teased as some sort of big reveal.

On to the Icy Whites!

At this point, you start to get a real sense of what they’re trying to do here — these are clean. But where is the gray??

OH THERE YOU ARE:

And now, let’s start mixing:

At this point, it seems obvious what’s going on — or, rather, what problem they were trying to fix: As WSU was mixing and matching with increasing frequency over the past couple of seasons, their combos became a hodgepodge of pieces that looked OK together, but didn’t really look ... sharp.

The tops, in particular, had no fewer than three colors — the most egregious of which was the anthracite with the dark jersey, light gray shoulder stripe and crimson numbers with light gray outlines. It should have looked great as WSU’s version of black. Instead, a lot of people complained about being unable to read the numbers.

Now, every thing has just two tones, with white being consistent across them. The numbers pop. The logos pop. And the crazy number of combos won’t look like a weird mish-mash of crimson, light gray, dark gray and white.

There was one more, which WSU billed as its “classic” look:

Not nearly as striking, but still: Cleaner.

What do you think?