Preseason Excitement: Anticipating the Upcoming Football Season

This is the Pigskin Daily History Dispatch, a podcast that covers the anniversaries of American football events throughout history.

Your host, Darren Hayes is podcasting from America's North Shore to bring you the memories of the gridiron one day at a time.

Hello my football friends.

This is Darren Hayes of pigskindispatch.com welcome once again to the Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history.

In this episode we're going to go back to sort of our old time things we did a few years ago.

We're going to have a solo episode here.

Just talk a little bit about what's going on in the world of football.

The season is getting ready to start.

We have training camps breaking open here as we hit the, you know, the end of July and things are really becoming quite exciting.

But I had a couple stories that I came across recently that I found really kind of interesting.

One of them was one that a co worker shared with me that's sort of going around social media.

And apparently, you know, the Auburn fans were very excited about this game but maybe also a little bit worried and had a strategy to, to help their team win and defeat this Georgia Tech team that was coming in to to play their team.

So everybody traveled by rail at that time.

So these Auburn students went and they greased the rails before the station that the for the arrival of Georgia Tech where they were going to get off and long past it.

So when the brakes were hit by the locomotive, they of course did not stop right away in Greece track sent the train five miles down from where the they were supposed to have their stop at.

And trains aren't known for with many cars to back up and go and reverse and back up five miles.

So these Georgia Tech players had to get out with their gear and hoof five miles to get back to the where the game is going to be played at Auburn's home field at that time.

And you know, they're, they're pooped.

It's the pot south as you can imagine and they're, they're poop that you know to all get out and Auburn ends up winning that game and it was going down in history some 130 years later as one of the great pranks in football history.

So wanted to share that with you.

And the other story is maybe something that's a little bit interesting that you know, this week, you know, as a Steelers fan, you know, I'M getting all the Steelers news coming in as everybody is, but there's been some uniform changes.

Everybody in the NFL is sort of revealing the last couple weeks what their throwback uniform is going to be this week.

Great, great marketing strategy by the way, for the jersey sales people, fanatics or whoever's selling the jerseys for them to, you know, get this, you know, out there to.

So people want to get that jersey before the game where they're actually wearing it so they can sit at home in their living room or be at the stadium dressed like the players are on the field.

You know, Timothy p. Brown of Footballarchaology.com has talked about the friction stripes.

Well, the Steelers, who were actually called the Pittsburgh Pirates are first half dozen to eight years in the the NFL.

They had the friction stripes, you know, vertical, three or four vertical big black stripes on sort of a, a tannish gold uniform and some couple friction stripes on the sleeves and this big emblem of the city of Pittsburgh seal in the middle of it.

And that was their original uniform.

Well, the, the Steelers are going to be wearing slightly altered version of that.

They can't have the emblem front and center because they have to have a number there by NFL rule.

So it's off, you know, to one side I believe, I believe it's on the left side of their chest and they have their player number over top of the replicated stripes for the friction stripes.

And people are sort of up in arms about this, you know, why could they do this, why are they breaking tradition and blah blah, blah.

A little bit of change on that.

It's reminiscent of the bumblebee uniforms you can think of back about 10 years ago that they wore in the Roethlisberg era.

So interesting facet and of course, you know, Green Bay packers having maybe sounds like the hand painted helmets that look like leather helmets.

And it's a, you know, big year for the packers wearing it this year.

And as a matter of fact, the Steelers will be wearing their throwback uniforms against the Packers.

I'm not sure if the packers will be wearing their throwbacks that day too, but that'd be kind of cool if they have those leather helmet looking things.

So just some interesting things to look forward to as the excitement builds for the National Football League season, the college season and your local high school teams.

You know, these kids are getting ready to hit the ground running and hit their practices and I'm not sure if they still do 2 a days or not.

I know the NFL doesn't anymore, but you know, they're getting ready, going to camps and things like that to get ready for the football season.

And we as fans are ready for.

The football season as well because what a happy time of year that is, especially before the opening weeks and this month of August.

Just enjoying the news.

Everybody's got high hopes, you know, everybody's 0 and 0 and just the excitement.

In the air, great pageantry and sports.

And fellowship to enjoy with your fellow fans and have some great heated discussions with your adversaries of other teams.

So enjoy this preseason of football.

Take it all in and relish it because after a few weeks there's going to be some that are still going to be on that all time high and there's others are going to be.

On an all time low once they suffer a loss or two and things aren't going so well for the season.

That's the way sports goes.

That's the way football goes.

And but so relish this time where everybody's happy.

That's a happy time for football and I think it's something we should really relish.

So think about that and enjoy the the history.

And we got some great things coming up for you next week, including we have another author that's going to come and talk about his book on some sports history and some great football facets and sharing some some great stories from there.

We're also going to get with Thomas hall again from Gridiron Intelligence.com Talk about another aspect of his great site and some of the sports analysts analytics that we'll get out of that site this year.

If you haven't taken that offer yet, you know, please do that real soon.

And of course, you know, we have our friend Timothy p. Brown of FootballArcheology.com talking about another one of his tidbits to teach us some more about football history as well as all of our things we have going on at Pigskin Dispatch with our jersey numbers, our College.

Football hall of Famers, our Pro Football.

Hall of Famer celebrations, our daily celebration of football.

And if you forgot that we do that, you check out our posts on gridiron on this gridiron Day, on our Pigskin Dispatch, post on Facebook and X and on LinkedIn and you'll see some of those things on LinkedIn.

We're under my name, Darren Hayes.

You can join us there.

And we touched the base on some of the great aspects of football history for each day that we're in and it's a really a great thing to relish and remember and celebrate.

So celebrate football in this preseason and have a great gridiron day.

That's all the football history we have today, folks.

Join us back tomorrow for more of your football history.

We invite you to check out our website, pigskindispatch.com not only to see the daily football history, but to experience positive football with our many articles on the good people of the game as well as our own football comic strip club.

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