Hardy Nickerson says he never nixed the Bucs’ uniforms

This past weekend, an old interview with an old Tampa Bay Buccaneers equipment manager surfaced. Frank Pupello claimed that in 1995, the Bucs were going to wear orange-on-orange uniforms for the first time in their history after a fan vote, and linebacker Hardy Nickerson nixed that uniform choice in the locker room.

Nickerson now told Jenna Laine of ESPN that that never happened.

"We were battling to try to go .500 that year," Nickerson told ESPN Bucs reporter Jenna Laine on Sunday. "To have something like that going on in the locker room before [a game] ... somebody had to say, 'Let's go win this football game.'

"If I was upset, it was because we were in the locker room worried about uniforms and not trying to go .500 that year."

That does seem like a much better thing to be upset about than the exact color of uniform the team would be wearing that day.

Nickerson was, of course, one of the key players in the team’s turn-around from perennial loser to annual playoff contender. Whether he disliked orange-on-orange or not.