Christian Spears saw something he didn’t like.



On one of his many Heinz Field walkthroughs — Pitt’s season opener against Virginia was four days away — the school’s deputy athletic director and football COO stopped at a display honoring Tony Dorsett in the stadium’s Great Hall.



The kiosk’s logo card was wrong, Pitt’s script is navy blue no longer, and that wasn’t going to work.



“Is this one getting flipped?” Spears asked associate athletic director John Abrams.



Yep. Yep, it is. Same goes for hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of signage, banners, decals, carpeting, flags — if it’s a Pitt day at Heinz Field and there’s a logo within eyeshot, it’ll be “game royal and university gold.” If April 7 was graduation day for Pitt’s rebranding project — two years of work with Nike reconnected the school with its classic colors and introduced a...