Purple > Orange; The story of BIG XII school colors

Everyone has hear the quote "orange makes me puke."

Lots of colors rank higher as my favorites. Red and blue are usually the colors you'll catch me wearing thanks to the Sooner and the Thunder. Nowhere in my wardrobe will you find the color orange. "I will not wear that gaudy orange, I will not. It is not my color wheel and I'm not gonna wear it." 

So lets rank the Big XII teams based on their colors just for fun.

1. Sooners

- Originally Crimson & Corn were selected by OU's first female factuly member, May Overstreet, but local merchants found it hard to match so they went with the next closest thing, Cream.

2. Kansas - Sky Blue and Maize were the orginal colors chosen for the school, but in 1890 when football arrived, the school decided to honor the donor that given money for the athletic field, a Harvard man, and Crimson was added.  The blue got darker because of that decision. Faculty members with Yale lineage spoke up and Crimson and Blue were officially adopted.

3. TCU - Not a good story behind these colors.  The purple represents royalty (you don't say), and the white stands for "a clean game." The lack of creative story should actually make this rank lower.

4. K-State - The Mildcats only have one official color and guess what it represents... both TCU and KSU rank high on this list because of one of my other favorite teams, the Vian Wolverines.

5. Texas Tech - Yosemite Sam picked red and black.  Other than that, there's not any real background story.

6. West Virginia - Don't call it "ol Blue & Gold" because those are Pitt's colors.  The upper class men of 1890 we so original they picked the exact same colors as their rivals at Pitt.  Most Mountaineers don't even know what is the capital of West Virginia.  Simple people. I really like Blue & Gold sausage so I ranked them higher on the list.

7. Iowa State -  They started out with Silver, Gold and Black. Silver for the mechanical department, Gold for the golden harvest, and Black for the vet department because they "kill but never cure." True story. They debated for 8 years about this and finally in 1899, they decided on Cardinal and Gold because it looked better on a sweater.  Such fashionistas.  But they still have a lot of black in their logos.  Great Vet school.

8. Baylor - In 1897, officials asked a committee of students to choose their official colors, so while on a train ride to Bryan, texas, Sara Rose Kendall was taken by a field in fool bloom of dandelions and thought it made a lovely combination. No joke.  DANDELIONS.  They debuted their new colors at the Baylor Glee Club concert on March 25, 1987.  

9. Oklahoma State - Pokes often claim it's "America's brightest orange," but I see the same orange every week when I am driving through the many construction zones on Oklahoma highways.  It's a very popular color.  It's used on Halloween to scare little kids; used by hunters so they don't get shot walking through the deer woods; used by road cones to bottleneck traffic everywhere.  I also see it worn by criminals as their official color.  The truth behind the orange and black is that it was chosen to honor a popular faculty member whose father was a Princeton grad. 

10. texas - THE WORST OF THE WORST. Burnt Orange? Who picks a color with the word "burnt" as a description? The colors were chosen because the school had no official colors when it traveled to Georgetown, texas, for a baseball game in 1885.  Two students jumped off the train just before departure and ran to a general store and asked the shop keep for two spools of ribbon.  The shop keeper returned with the color that he sold the very least, burnt orange.  But that's not the end of it. They still had no official colors until 1893. At the first recorded UT football game (in which they got beat by a group of high school kids at the Bickler School) the school made it official.