Think your accounting department needs more of an interior presence? Maybe you’d prefer some more effort from customer service. And what will it take for your sales reps to keep their heads in the game? More pay? Free parking? Hats with cool company logos?
Probably not.
But here’s an idea for you: dress your coworkers in blue. Brown or maroon? Not so much. That’s right. Forget all the talk about more corporate training and team building and instead concentrate on picking winning wardrobe colors.
We’ve broken down the team colors—usually two—of each college basketball national champion throughout the tournament’s history and created a list of winning tones.
A few notes about our unofficial official methodology: We used the school’s officially listed team colors, and went with the official athletic colors if they differed from the academic colors—and really, get over yourself, UCLA. Your differing subtle shades of blue get lost on the TV screen anyway. And speaking of blues, we’ve lumped all the similar but trademarked colors together. For our intents and purposes, blue is blue is blue, whether you’re from Ann Arbor, Michigan or Lexington, Kentucky. The same goes with red. And while there are college teams who use white as a primary color, they weren’t among tournament winners. In most cases, teams use white as an accent color, using for piping or numbers on jerseys, so we didn’t include those instances. We took the same approach with black. Although nine black-clad teams won national titles, many college teams have a black combination in their wheelhouse. We’re not counting those.
But if you’re looking for a way to upgrade your own or your team’s presence at work, you may not have to look much further than the team colors in NCAA champions.
Here’s a breakdown of the winningest colors in NCAA tournament history:
Blue: 55
Red: 21
Gold: 18
Black: 9
Orange: 7
Green: 5
Gray: 4
Purple: 2
Brown: 1
Maroon: 1
By Marco Buscaglia, Tribune Content Agency
Published in the Chicago Tribune on March 20, 2022
