IU football helmet bears familiarity to lacrosse helmet

When IU men’s club lacrosse coach Peter Tumbas saw the new IU football helmets revealed on his Twitter timeline, he wasn’t seeing all of them for the first time.

His team had worn one of the designs last season.

The lacrosse team wore matte crimson helmets with the state flag logo on the side from March until the end of the season in May.

The IU lacrosse team Twitter accounted tweeted, “Nice move by #iufb, you’re welcome to our state flag design” along with a picture of the team’s helmets, bearing the similarity to the newly released football helmets.

But the idea wasn’t Tumbas’.

Nor the lacrosse team’s.

Tumbas said he saw the state flag helmet on Tim O’Brien’s website, where he blogs about uniform design. According to the website, O’Brien is an IU Bloomington graduate.

“He has probably 10 different IU (football) uniforms mocked up on his blog,” Tumbas said. “We ended up finding a helmet and it was the state flag helmet. (I said) ‘You know what, let’s do it.’”

Tumbas said the idea of a state flag helmet had crossed his mind before while watching Maryland, who has has put the Maryland state flag design on its lacrosse jersey and helmet, as well as its football helmets and jerseys.

That was too much flag for Tumbas.

“Maryland has been putting their state flag on everything for the past couple of years,” he said. “I give them a hard time. I give Under Armour a hard time. It’s just too much.”

He said initially he decided on the state flag helmet just to “spite” Maryland.

“Other states have the state flag,” he said, “We’re going to do this too.”

The team finalized its decal in January, and started wearing the helmet in March.

He said the team, made up of mostly out of state players, embraced the new helmets, but he’s not sure if it was because of the decal or the matte finish.

“That’s not a helmet that you can get if you go to Dick’s,” Tumbas said. “If the guys didn’t like the state flag decal, they were still pretty pumped with the helmet. They’re the only team in the country that had that particular helmet.”

Tumbas said the first new football helmet he saw on Twitter was the cream and crimson design with the IU logos, another design he said he had seen on O’Brien’s website. After seeing that, he wasn’t surprised to see the state flag helmet.

The team got some buzz on its Twitter with the state flag helmet, but Tumbas said that quickly changed with the helmet that was released last in the unveiling video.

“We were happy to claim (the state flag helmet) for about 10 minutes,” he said. “Then the chrome helmet came out and no one wanted to talk about our helmet anymore. There’s only so much we can do.”