Up until now, the weirdest helmet ever worn on a college football field was probably Maryland's "pride" design, which -- like the rest of the Maryland uni -- had a split personality.

But Notre Dame has just out-weirded the Terps. The Irish have unveiled the uniform for this year's "Shamrock Series" game (Oct. 6 against Miami at Soldier Field in Chicago). As you can see, it features a helmet that's straight out of bizarroland -- two-thirds polished gold, one-third navy with the leprechaun logo.

If they couldn't make up their minds between gold and navy, wouldn't you expect them to split the different by going half-and-half, instead of this lopsided design? Yeah, it's ugly, but that's secondary; the main thing is, it's strange.

And speaking of strange, you see that excessively wide stripe on the left pant leg? It's only on the left leg -- there's no corresponding stripe on the right side.

This leads to all sorts of questions:

• Why isn't the face mask partially gold? Surely we have the technology to achieve that, no?

• Why isn't the jersey partially gold?

• Why not have one gold sock and one navy sock?

• Why not one gold glove and one navy glove?

And so on. Make all of the elements part-gold and part-navy -- otherwise your imbalance is out of balance!

The real takeaway here, just as it was with the Maryland design, is simple: Under Armour and adidas should stick to the basics and leave the crazy stuff to the professionals (i.e., Nike).