Before the opening video plays on the JumboTron, before Bully rides out on the doghouse, before the smoke under the inflatable helmet, before people even start filing in to Davis Wade Stadium, a lot has already taken place to make the game possible, most of which has gone unseen to fans.Before Bulldog players don the Maroon and White attire to knock heads with the opposition, someone has to make sure each one has the right gear to wear and that the school has uniforms and equipment in the first place.
That someone is Phil Silva. Silva has served as MSU’s head athletic equipment manager for 23 years and has assembled a team of 12 students and two graduate assistants to aid him in his work.
“Every home game is like a road trip for us,” Silva said. “We have to pack up everything and move to the stadium. There’s a lot of work that goes with it. We handle it pretty well though. We know how to adapt and overcome. I’ve got some good students that work for me. They put in a lot of time and effort, and I’m blessed to have them.”
The athletic equipment team does most of its work on Thursday nights before home games.
“We move into the stadium on Thursday nights,” Silva said. “We’ll move all the players’ stuff from the Holliman Building. We’ll clean all the helmets, inside and out, put new facemasks on some of them, as well as new stripes, decals, numbers or whatever else that needs to be done. Once we get all that done, we organize all the uniforms and put them out for the players.”
Silva said the head coach is primarily responsible for choosing what the team’s uniform looks like. He said that when each new head coach took over the MSU football team, the team’s uniform underwent changes.
Under a contract with Nike while the football team was under Jackie Sherrill, the athletics program featured several logos with a different MSU one used for each sport. Now under Sylvester Croom, who wanted to use the M-State logo as the sole logo for all MSU athletics, the program has contracts with Russell Athletics and Adidas.
Silva said baseball is the only remaining sport that uses a Mississippi State logo other than M-State, and it is attributed mostly to its head coach’s Starkville legacy.
“I think Coach Polk has a lot to do with the baseball team using the M-over-S logo,” Silva said. “That logo has always been their tradition. It’s an old tradition, and Larry Templeton and Coach Polk have talked about that and decided to keep it.”
Silva said Coach Croom is a “plain and simple kind of guy,” and that he has contributed to what the football team’s current uniforms look like.
“He wanted a plain and simple uniform,” Silva said. “Russell made up a uniform for him, even with the number he wore in college, and it was just what he wanted.”
The team currently wears white helmets with the M-State logo on each side and has both a white and maroon set of jerseys and pants.
Silva said that it is the head coach’s choice as to which combination the team will wear on a game day.
The default NCAA rule for football is that the home team will wear dark jerseys, and the visiting team will dress in white.
For exceptions such as when MSU wore white when it hosted purple-jerseyed LSU, the home school must write a letter to the NCAA about a month in advance. If the visiting team agrees, then different jerseys can be worn.
The Bulldogs will be wearing maroon jerseys with white pants in Saturday’s homecoming game against UAB, but Silva said the team will be wearing an all-maroon uniform soon.
Silva said his equipment team does a lot of preventive maintenance prior to game time so that they won’t be overwhelmed with work during the game itself.
He said that work during the game usually isn’t too bad, except when it starts raining, as it has for both of MSU’s home games so far this season. Silva expects and is hoping for clear weather this weekend.
“A lot of people come to the games and don’t realize what all goes on behind the scenes,” Silva said. “I’d encourage [them] to sometimes come take a look on a Thursday night while we set everything up. We set everything up, the players come and perform, and we take everything down.