The trend has hardly arrived at full Daisy Dukes level, as ESPN’s Bomani Jones had feared, but something definitely is happening with basketball players’ shorts.
Specifically, they’re getting shorter.
For fresh evidence that the kids are chucking baggy shorts that hang to the knee — or below — look no further than the Michigan Wolverines, who will take the floor Thursday in the Sweet 16 and are once again on the forefront of hoops fashion. These aren’t the short shorts of, say, the Magic Johnson-Larry Bird era; they’re more like those worn by Michael Jordan, who helped usher in this trend, along with Michigan’s “Fab Five” in 1991.
“My freshman year of high school I had a pair of shorts that were just way too big,” Michigan freshman Jordan Poole told MLive.com in January. “My coach wouldn’t let me roll them up, so my sophomore year I started wearing higher shorts. They just got higher and higher and I started feeling more comfortable.”
Few of the Michigan players wear shorts that touch the top of their knees and it’s all part of a trend among young players, like Poole. “The baggy shorts had its run,” Jalen Rose, an NBA analyst for ESPN and, as a member of the Fab Five, a forefather of baggy shorts, told The Post’s Jorge Castillo two years ago. “It’s been 20 years.”
Michigan’s Isaiah Livers, also a freshman, went with a shorter look when he was a high school junior. “I just wasn’t feeling the long shorts over the knee caps,” he said. “You’ve got to be comfortable out there.”
Jones lamented the trend on “Around the Horn,” but there’s nothing that can be done about it. What goes down must come up when it comes to fashion, with each change having a distinctive flourish.
“What was popular [in the past] will reappear in more modern but similar ways,” Vince Quevedo, a fashion designer and Kent State associate professor, told MLive, explaining why you can’t just keep clothes in hopes that they’ll come back into style. “Sports uniforms are not any different.”
He predicted that “men’s basketball uniforms will get smaller and tighter in the upcoming years. The fashion cycle says it’s time to change from one extreme to the other. But don’t think it will go back to tight shorts again because men are not ready, yet, to show what they have, or don’t have, under their shorts. And that’s because street fashion has not gotten to that point, but it will again in the future.”
Michigan’s Ibi Watson is convinced. “The long shorts are out of date,” the sophomore told the New York Times. “If they can touch your knees, they’re way too long.”
Manufacturers haven’t caught on yet, with Watson and other improvising by rolling up their waistbands.
“Three rolls is the max,” Watson said. “If you go four, it’s too much.”
For the foreseeable future, baggy and long are out.
“That’s not my swag,” as Poole put it.
Read more from The Post:
Dan Hurley will try to fix the mess at U-Conn
A bright future awaits UMBC’s Ryan Odom, but will it be with the Retrievers or another team?
Here’s something worse than Charles Barkley’s golf swing: His NCAA tournament bracket
