Does Color Matter?

Once again at the bowl game, one of my biggest pet peeves with the Spartan Marching Band happened. Let me first say that I love the SMB. I get as excited about them as I do any other aspect of a football Saturday. I always see the pregame and postgame concerts.

I'm also color blind. I was born with it, had it all my life. I'm red-green technically, but I mess up on a lot of colors. So the color of something is not the first, or even the fifth thing I generally notice. And I generally pay little attention to color, and really don't much care, cause I hardly see it anyway.

But...

Why do our flag girls always seem to support the other team?

Has anyone else noticed that our flag girls will OFTEN have what seem to be randomly selected colored flags? And that many times, by what I can only guess is whatever fabric was on sale recently, our flags are the colors of our opponent in the game? Does this bother anyone else?

From my point of view, it is annoying and distressing. I'm out there in full MSU apparel. So is everyone else around me. So is the team. So is the rest of the Marching Band. The Cheerleaders. The dance team. Those fraternity kids that rings the bell. And then our flag girls will use Texas Tech Red as the color of their flags at the bowl game, and it will be on national TV.

If I was in charge of this, I would have a simple solution. They would be allowed different flags in a "green" category, and additionally, they could have an assortment which included some "white." On the rare occasion, they could perhaps use a color outside of this, but only once they checked the schedule (posted years in advance) and saw it was NOT a color which supported our adversary on that day. And never yellow or blue.

Now, why does this happen anyway? I've been told the argument that "The flag girls need to stand out somehow from the rest of the Spartan Marching Band. That is the way they do it."

This argument made me almost fall over. First, they don't need to stand out. It's not what Spartans do. We're 300 strong, not 295 plus those 5 people wearing neon. The guy who stands out in the crowd at Spartan Stadium is generally going to get popcorn thrown on him for being an Iowa fan, not celebrated for his diversity. Second, they are wearing a completely different uniform than the rest of the SMB, and if that didn't help, they are furiously waving flags. Yeah, we noticed you, you stand out plenty!

So please, for the love of Sparty, can we please see some green flags next season?