Nice try, Denard. I’ve got uniform spies everywhere but even I caught this one. This season Denard switched from a Riddell helmet, used the past two seasons, to a Schutt model this year. Here he is in 2009 with the Riddell: And yesterday (from the nice photo gallery put together by Brad at MnB Nation), here’s the Schutt. A quick text to uniform guru Steve Sapardanis confirmed the switch. Sap checked his notes and verified that indeed, Denard wore Riddell in the Gator Bowl but trotted out a Schutt at the Spring game and at the Under the Lights press conference. As I wrote last season, I’m partial to Schutt. These are the helmets that are reconditioned and painted in Oxford, Ohio each year by a man named Russ Hawkins at a company called Capitol Varsity Sports. More from my 2010 post: This May I asked Falk about how Michigan hooked up with Capitol Varsity and Hawkins and he told me relationship goes back to the mid-1960s. Falk was the manager for his high school team in Oxford and naturally they used the local company for their reconditioning services. This relationship followed Falk to college at Miami, OH when he handled the equipment under Redskins head coach Bo Schembechler. When he was reunited with Bo up in Ann Arbor in…
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I’m Partial to Schutt (Reloaded)
[ed. 8/15 – After a few reader comments and questions, I revised this post. Gotta love Michigan football, where questions about helmet paint get the blood pumping.] I hope you had a chance to catch longtime equipment manager Jon Falk in a recent edition of ‘Countdown to Kick-off’, discussing reconditioning of the Michigan helmet. In the video Falk notes that there are two brands of helmet at Michigan, Schutt and Riddell (although a few varieties of styles are available for each company). Back in May I swung by Schembechler Hall to catch one batch of helmets just as they were being scooped up from the folks from Capitol Varsity Sports, the folks who recondition the Schutt equipment. Here’s a few of the facemaskless helmets sacked up about to be loaded on the truck to Oxford, OH: As wonderfully highlighted in the Countdown video, the man who cares for the Schutt gear once it arrives in Oxford is a man named Russ Hawkins. While the folks at Riddell use a mold to define the maize wing pattern, Hawkins sets the paint boundary by hand. To watch him work his magic is a sight to be sure: Sorry Riddell, give me a Schutt. This May I asked Falk about how Michigan hooked up with Capitol Varsity and Hawkins and he told me…