Well, for those that need a distraction, thought this was a great story ... and quite UCF related. Paywall, and I won't post the full article, but I'll quote some portions, especially about UCF.
Meet Armando Villarreal, the man behind college football’s coolest helmets
QUOTE: _'... call from Brad Haley, business manager of Schutt Sports ... conversation ... six years ago, altered both the trajectory of Villarreal’s life and his artistic career ... If that call goes to voicemail and Villarreal forgets about it, he likely never leaves his municipal job working for Imperial — a tiny city with a population of less than 2,000 in rural southwest Nebraska ... he did pick up and listened to Haley’s unusual pitch: to airbrush a specialty helmet for Mississippi State in honor of alum Sonny Montgomery, a World War II veteran and former Mississippi state politician. Villarreal and Haley first met at a retail summit in Las Vegas years earlier, when Villarreal was working for a California-based art production company contracted by professional teams and leagues ... Villarreal has done individually airbrushed helmets for 12 programs since 2018, including Utah, UCF, Maryland, BYU, Michigan and Tennessee. A former member of the U.S. Army Reserve who was deployed both to Kosovo and Iraq in the early 2000s, Villarreal did his best to balance his city job with airbrushing hundreds of helmets each year — until 2022 when the demand for his artistry became overwhelming ... various programs will reach out to Schutt Sports, which then contacts Villarreal ... Schutt handles the orders ... many helmets are needed ... eventually shipped to Villareal’s home in Imperial ... “I just have to make sure it looks good on TV,” he said ... Schools will have their own graphic designers send mock-ups to Villarreal. The tricky part is wrapping an image around the entirety of the helmet. Some ideas are simple and easier to apply, such as UCF’s moon design honoring the university’s historical ties to the U.S. space program, or Tennessee’s helmet honoring the Smoky Mountains ... one project so intimidating that he initially turned it down multiple times ... paint helmets commemorating the passing of Utah players Ty Jordan in 2020 and Aaron Lowe in 2021 ... “I think I told them four times I couldn’t do it ,,, Cody just kept on me and kept on me. Finally, I said we’ll do it. That was the year I quit my day job because it was so much. It was about six hours per helmet” ...'
