Just to try to prove I am not a complete stick in the mud (though I am)...
I really like our current basketball uniforms and the tapered "funnel cloud" stripes on the shorts. Somebody put together a few concepts on using that same thing on our football uniforms...
http://i.imgur.com/4t71HCj.png
I thought that would be a nice compromise -- get away from the USC comparisons, but retain a cleaner look with a modern twist to it (such as some of the OSU combinations above), build around a cool concept related to our Cyclone origins, and build some consistency between football and basketball. I think that would be cool and likely rather unique among our peers.
You could mix-and-match combinations, add helmet colors, and mix facemask colors from there.
Even if not that exactly, I think involving that stripe pattern would be neat.
Like the cardinal/cardinal/gold. Not so much the cardinal/white/white... need a different color helmet. Same with cardinal/gold/cardinal...