Football History

The scarlet and gray Buckeye helmet is more than just headgear; it's a symbol of tradition and fierce pride. Its evolution reflects not just changing safety standards, but also the team's identity and artistic expression.

-Early Days (1890s-1940s): The journey began with simple leather helmets resembling oversized baseball caps. They offered minimal protection and quickly evolved into leather helmets with ear flaps and metal bars for the face. The iconic scarlet stripe made its debut in the 1940s, solidifying the helmet's visual connection to the university.

-The Plastic Revolution (1950s-1970s): Increased concerns for player safety led to the introduction of hard plastic helmets in the 1950s. The gray base color was established, and the stripe received a makeover, becoming wider and bolder. Numbers appeared on the sides, and the iconic "Buckeye Leaf" sticker tradition arose in the 1960s, earning its place as a symbol of individual and team achievements.

-Modern Era (1980s-Present): Technological advancements brought lighter, stronger materials like polycarbonate. Face masks became more sophisticated, and stripes experimented with width and color variations. Special edition helmets emerged, paying homage to anniversaries, specific games, and even the state of Ohio.

The Tulane Green Wave football helmet has undergone a transformation mirroring the evolution of the sport itself. Early Tulane helmets were simple, often lacking the intricate designs common today. As the game grew in popularity, so too did the complexity of helmet designs.

The Green Wave's helmet has generally maintained a green color scheme, a nod to the team's name. However, variations in shade, stripe patterns, and logo placements have occurred over the years. Modern Tulane helmets often incorporate sleek designs, advanced technology, and team-specific graphics. While the helmet's core elements remain consistent, subtle changes have helped to create a distinctive look that reflects the spirit and tradition of the Green Wave program.

As Tulane football continues to evolve, it's likely that the helmet design will follow suit. Whether it's through technological advancements or creative redesigns, the Green Wave helmet will undoubtedly remain a symbol of the program's identity and pride.

The Penn Quakers football helmet has undergone a significant evolution reflecting the changing landscape of the sport. Early helmets were rudimentary, offering little protection. As the game grew more physical, so did the headgear.

The Quakers' helmet design has generally maintained a classic look. The iconic red and blue stripes, representing the university colors, have been a staple for decades. However, the helmet's shape and materials have dramatically improved with advancements in technology. Modern Penn helmets incorporate cutting-edge safety features, such as advanced padding and shock absorption, while still preserving the team's traditional aesthetic.

In recent years, Penn has experimented with variations on the classic design, including alternate helmet colors and patterns. These innovations add a contemporary touch while honoring the team's rich history.

The Harvard Crimson football helmet has undergone a relatively modest evolution compared to many other programs. The foundation of the Harvard helmet has remained consistent: a classic, crimson shell. Early helmets were leather and offered little protection, but as the game became more dangerous, advancements in materials and design were adopted.

The most noticeable changes have occurred in the facemask and decals. Early helmets often lacked facemasks entirely or featured simple bars. Over time, facemasks became more complex to protect players' faces. Decals, too, have evolved. While the core crimson color remains, the placement and design of the Harvard logo and other markings have varied over the years. Despite these alterations, the Harvard Crimson helmet maintains a timeless and traditional aesthetic, reflecting the university’s history and prestige.

The Columbia Lions football helmet has undergone a relatively modest evolution compared to many other programs. Early iterations likely mirrored the simplistic designs of the era, offering little more than basic protection. As helmet technology progressed, the Lions adopted more advanced models, incorporating stripes and logos.

A defining characteristic of the Columbia helmet has been its simplicity. White is the predominant color, often with a single blue stripe down the center. Logos have varied over the years, including the Columbia “C,” a lion head, and combinations thereof. While the helmet's design has evolved with advancements in safety and aesthetics, the core elements of white, blue, and the Columbia identity have remained consistent, creating a classic and recognizable look.

The UTEP Miners football program, though relatively young, has undergone significant changes in its helmet design. Reflecting the program's journey, the helmets have evolved from simple to more sophisticated looks.  

Over time, the helmet design continued to refine, with variations in logo placement and color schemes. The Blazers experimented with different shades of green and gold, as well as incorporating the mascot in various sizes and positions. While the core elements of the helmet remained consistent, the subtle changes reflected the program's growth and desire to create a strong visual identity.  

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The Heisman name is synonymous with college football mainly because of the award that is handed out each year to the top college football player.

The prestige of the honor of being a Heisman winner is off of the charts. Many do not know who the famous trophy is in the memorial of Coach John Heisman.

Erie News Now's John Last, on his weekly The Last Owrd segment, traveled to the place where Heisman learned to play the game, Titusville, Pennsylvania.

John Heisman's formative years in Titusville, Pennsylvania, played a crucial role in shaping the man who would later become a legendary football coach and the namesake of the prestigious Heisman Trophy. Here's a summary of his upbringing:

Early Life:

Born in 1869 in Cleveland, Ohio, Heisman moved to Titusville with his family when he was young.
Titusville was a bustling oil boomtown, exposing Heisman to the grit and determination of early American industrialism.

He excelled in both academics and athletics, becoming valedictorian of his high school class and participating in baseball, gymnastics, and football.

Athletic Prowess:

Despite his smaller stature (5'8"), Heisman displayed natural athletic talent and leadership qualities.
He played quarterback, halfback, and even placekicker for his high school football team.
He earned the nickname "Little Heis" due to his athleticism and intelligence.

Academic Focus:

Equally passionate about academics, Heisman delivered the graduation speech titled "The Dramatist as Sermonizer," showcasing his eloquence and intellectual curiosity.

He pursued a law degree at the University of Pennsylvania, eventually practicing law briefly before returning to athletics as a coach.
Titusville's Influence:

The competitive environment of Titusville and the emphasis on hard work likely instilled in Heisman the drive and ambition he later displayed in his coaching career.

His early athletic experiences in Titusville may have sparked his passion for football and his innovative approach to the game.
Legacy:

While his time in Titusville may not be the sole factor in his success, it undeniably laid the foundation for his future achievements.

Heisman's story offers an inspiring example of how a small-town upbringing can shape a future legend, emphasizing the importance of perseverance, dedication, and intellectual curiosity.

In conclusion, John Heisman's childhood in Titusville, Pennsylvania, provided the springboard for his remarkable journey, shaping him into the innovative coach and iconic figure he became.

Born July 16, 1889, Percy Langdon Wendell, nicknamed "Bullet" for his speed, wasn't just a football player – he was a multi-sport athlete who left his mark on both college football and basketball. While his legacy is more prominent in the coaching realm, Wendell's playing career at Harvard University deserves recognition for its brilliance.

Wendell's football career spanned from 1910 to 1912, a time when the sport was still evolving. Despite this, he established himself as a dominant force. Earning the prestigious title of All-American an impressive three times consecutively (1910-1912) speaks volumes about his skill. He was known for his speed, agility, and powerful tackling, a well-rounded skillset that made him a nightmare for opposing teams.

Wendell played a pivotal role in Harvard's success during his tenure. Unfortunately, detailed statistics from that era are scarce, but historical accounts paint a picture of a player who consistently elevated his team's performance.

We do know his Harvard team finished 8-0-1 that season, keeping arch rival Yale scoreless in the final game to force a tie per the National Football Foundation. "Bullet" was the star, gaining 103 yards on 21 rushes against the Elis. In the final victory of 1910, an 18-0 decision over Dartmouth, Percy had produced both of his team's touchdowns. During the 1911 season, while Wendell continued to dominate the Crimson attack, he lead the club in scoring. He drew Walter Camp's All-America selection in each of his first two years, but injuries sidelined his abilities as Harvard's senior captain in 1912.

While football was his primary focus, Wendell also excelled on the basketball court for Harvard. Though information on his basketball career is limited, his athletic prowess likely translated seamlessly onto the hardwood.

Following his graduation in 1913, Wendell transitioned into coaching. He served as head coach for several college football programs, most notably Boston University, Williams College, and Lehigh University. While his coaching record wasn't exceptional, it solidified his dedication to the sport and his desire to share his knowledge with future generations of players.

Percy Wendell's legacy may not be as widely known as some other football greats, but his accomplishments deserve recognition. He was a dominant player who helped shape the early years of college football at a prestigious institution. His impact extended beyond the field, as he continued to contribute to the sport through coaching. He serves as a reminder of the rich history of college athletics and the dedication of athletes who excelled in multiple sports.

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This game is an instant classic!

The Storyline of Deion Sanders' making his FBS Coaching Debut for the Colorado Buffaloes as they played the TCU Horned Frogs, whose last game had been playing in the national Championship in January.

The 'expert" said Coach Sanders was doing it all wrong. From former Buff's stars leaving in the transfer window, to naming his son the starting QB, and some of the kids he coached since they were 4-years old to starting positions. and White helmets? C'mon Coach Prime!

Well Sander's innovations and culture change had the University of Colorado shock the college football world on September 2, 2023 by outlasting No. 17 TCU 45-42 on the Horned Frogs' home turf in the season opener for both teams.

Quarterback Shedeur Sanders threw for a school record 510 yards and four touchdowns, freshman running back Dylan Edwards scored four times, and four different Buffs had at least 100 yards receiving (another school record) to highlight a potent Colorado offense.
It was a shootout right to the last minute!

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In the leather-helmeted days of yore, football jerseys were a canvas of clean lines and bold colors, proudly displaying a team's name or city across the chest. This is the untold story of how logos, once relegated to the shadows, muscled their way onto the gridiron, forever changing the face of the beautiful game. We'll delve into the fierce competition between sportswear giants, the cultural shift that embraced branding, and the trailblazing teams who dared to be different. Buckle up, football fans, as we explore the fascinating origin story of the logos that existed on jerseys before players' numbers did.

Timothy P Brown takes us on his research of football jerseys with embarrassment and who did it first. From Furman to Lafayette and points in between, we learn about uniform decor transformation.

-Transcribed Conversation with Timothy Brown Jerseys with Emblems

Hello, my football friends. This is Darin. He's at pigskindispatch.com. Welcome once again to The Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history.

Welcome to Tuesday and a research journey to footballarchaeology.com and Timothy P. Brown. Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen. Darren, thank you.

Looking forward to chatting, as always. It should be. This is, I think, actually a pretty fun one. Not that others aren't.

But, you know, this one's just particularly fun. Yeah, this is this is a neat one because we get to talk about uniform adornment. Your tidbit back in the middle of May was titled Football Jerseys with Emblems.

So this is a fascinating spectacle of football that we love colors and seeing teams with great designs on their uniforms. So this may be the start of it. Yeah.

You know, well, the weird thing is I was looking at a. Yeah, I was running through some social media that I happened to see a guy wearing a jersey from the 90s, and it may have been an arena team; it could have been, you know, whatever, some off league. But anyway, they had a big dog on the jersey, and the number was smaller. But anyway, I hadn't seen anything like that for quite some time.

So this one is about, like, you know, if you think about it. Um. You know, hockey, especially, you know, they've got jerseys on their sweaters, right? They're not jerseys.

They've got emblems on the sweaters, the red wings. You know, I live in the Detroit area. They got the wheel and the wing.

Right. And everybody else has some kind of a, even if it's just a wordmark or the Blackhawks, whomever, you know, they've got they got a big emblem. And even baseball has some.

Basketball has a pretty good number of emblems. You know, a lot of times it's just, you know, the wordmark or something like that. But it's not unusual.

Like San Francisco's, you know, Golden State has had, you know, their the Golden Gate Bridge and things like that on their jerseys. But football doesn't typically have not had that. So, you know, I was trying to figure out, OK, when they had them and, you know, kind of why and, you know, why don't they anymore, those kinds of things? And so, you know, football had.

So, you know, in the beginning, a lot of times football teams wore jerseys with the like the main letter, like why, if you were playing for Yale or an H, if you played for Harvard or they'd have smaller, you know, the smaller combination of letters like Slippery Rock Normal School might have S.R. and S. You know, so I mean, there's if you look at old time pictures, you see even on like the canvas jackets and the canvas vest, you see those kinds of initials. But oftentimes, they were just plain. And even when, you know, the first numbers were worn on the backs of jerseys in 1905.

And it took a long time, took a couple of decades, really, for teams to start wearing numbers on the front of their jerseys. So in the meantime, you end up having, you know, you had the onset in mid-teens. You had the onset of, you know, stickum cloth or friction strips.

I mean, there are different names for it. But, you know, if you think about, you know, almost any picture of red grains, you see, you know, vertical stripes on his jersey. And he probably has stripes on the inside of his arms.

And that was kind of treated leather that, you know, the belief was that it held running backs, in particular, you know, hold on to the ball. And when those first came out, a lot of times, you're just big ovals or even squares on the front of the jerseys. But they, you know, they had a functional use, but then people kind of got fancy with them, and they started creating designs, and they started putting them on the linemen, too, who sometimes carried the ball.

But, you know, for the most part, did not. And became quite a laundering nightmare, I'm sure, after the game, trying to clean up. Yeah, I don't know how the heck they did it sometimes, you know.

Probably didn't wash them is probably what they did. Yeah. Well, in fact, then they didn't, you know, I mean, hardly anybody wore white.

But here and there, you know, there were teams that did. But how they got that stuff clean, I don't know. But so then, you know, they kind of started having taken some artistic license.

And so often it was like teams that were like their main letter, their name, their school started with what I'll just call a straight a straight letter, meaning a K and an L, a Y. So it's just a series of straight lines. And then they'd incorporate that letter into the friction strip pattern, you know, and so there are some of them that are actually pretty cool looking. But, they still weren't like emblems in the way that's like hockey, you know, a sweater might have.

But then the earliest one I found was Furman in 1925 had a bullseye on there. You know, I think it had three rings in it. So folks, you have to see go to the show notes and go to the link of Tim's story on this on the tidbit.

And you'll see this great image of the Furman team from 1925 that he's describing. You'll see exactly what he talks about. These uniforms are really great.

I'm looking at it right now. It's looks like a certain red department store would be very pleased with these jerseys that make a commercial out of this. Although it was purple and white.

So. Oh, OK. And actually, somehow, they got ahold of one of those things.

So their their archives has one of those original jerseys. You know, really cool looking. So now why Furman had a target on their jerseys? I don't know, but.

Maybe it will help the quarterback with the forward pass downfield. Well, all the linemen had it, too. The next one I found was Bucknell, which is actually kind of interesting. It was like Bucknell in 1930.

They've got they've got a small number up kind of on the chest on the front of their jersey and then down basically on the belly. There are two Bucknell is the bison. And so there are two buffalos or bisons kind of charging at each other.

You know, kind of across the belly. And so, you know, they've got both the emblem and the number. And then, kind of the weirdest one, I think, is probably 1932 Lafayette.

So, it's the same general neighborhood as Bucknell. It's, you know, there are goofballs from Pennsylvania. And so, you know, they're named after the Marquis de Lafayette.

And so they have this kind of looks like the outline of George Washington on a court, right? You know that profile. But it's it's an image, or it's a profile of the Marquis, and it's sitting there on the jersey. It's like it's fine enough.

You know, there are little inset lines where his nose or his ears are, whatever they are. And there's no way anybody in the stands can see that stuff. You know, even in a small stadium.

So it's it's kind of it's so finely done that it kind of just didn't make any sense, frankly. But anyways, it's just this great image. And it's like, who the heck decided to put that baby on the jersey? Yeah, you have two different images.

You have like a full team picture of the Lafayette team. You know, all the members are sitting in bleachers. It's kind of far away.

And you can you can see it's maybe somebody's head looks almost like, you know, the front of a dime, you know, that kind of image. But then you have a picture of five players a little bit closer, and you can see, you know, the marquee there. So it's very, very detailed for an emblem on the front of a jersey.

Yeah. Yeah. A hundred years ago.

Yeah. You know, you know, I mean, presumably, it's a black-and-white image. So I assume it's all just a white or a gray or something, you know, logo.

So you're like the Blackhawks. You know, there's multiple colors. And so at least it helps, you know, kind of differentiate the features in a face.

But anyway, this is one of those things that, you know, I mean, football at that time, you know, football didn't require numbers on the jerseys on the front of the jerseys until 1937. And it was like in 41, where they started numbering by position. You know, guards are wearing this number, and tackles are wearing that.

But, you know, so I mean, these preceded those rules. Right. So it's one of those like, OK, well, why didn't football have more emblems? You know, they could, they could have.

Right. Right. And other sports did.

But football, for whatever reason, didn't go the emblem route. And, you know, ultimately, the space got taken over by numbers. Well, perhaps it was this 1932 Lafayette jersey that just did them in.

We've got to stop this. We've got to stop the madness. That's a reasonable assumption to make.

However, is it 1932? Isn't it that same era where you have claims to the ugliest uniforms in football history? Yes. The 30s, 30s are the 30s in general. And kind of the longer you got it, the further you got into the decade, the worse it got.

So so maybe Lafayette was not so bad compared to their their peers at the time. Yeah, I'd have to see the back of their pants. Make a judgment because in the 30s, you saw those stripes up the back of the pants that are absolutely hideous.

Of course, the poor guy's head is trapped in between two friction strips. You know, if those are walls, he's not going to have a very good view of anything looking off that jersey. Well, very interesting, Tim.

This is something I've never really thought about with the emblems being on hockey and, you know, so prevalent and why they aren't in football. I never really thought of it. But you really pointed out something else, the obvious that probably many of us overlook and gave us a history on it.

And we really appreciate that. And you do this a lot. You have these little oddities that, you know, we we probably should know and just don't think about.

But you do it on a daily basis. And it's really fascinating. I think the listeners would love to enjoy some of these and your tidbits each and every day.

So please share with us how we can share in learning this. Sure. Real simple.

Go out to my website, FootballArcheology.com. Any story that's out there gives you an opportunity to subscribe at the end. And if you haven't been there before, I think it kind of forces you to at least say yes or no to subscribing. But anyway, if you subscribe, you'll get an email every day at seven o'clock Eastern that has that day's story.

Typically, a one or two-minute read with a couple of pictures. Alternatively, you can follow me on Twitter at Football Archeology. And, you know, then it becomes more hit or miss because of the way Twitter is working nowadays.

Who sees what is a total mystery? All right. Well, Tim, we thank you very much for sharing your time and knowledge and information with us on a daily basis.

And we thank you for joining us each Tuesday to talk about some of these. And we hope to talk to you again next Tuesday. Yeah, I'll see you a week from now.

Thanks.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.

Love the football jersey designs and evolution wait till you check out the History of American Football Jersey.

-Football Jersey Frequently Asked Questions

-What are American football jerseys made of? Modern jerseys are a mix of synthetic fibers such as polyester or a blend of different materials such asspandex, for more check out our in-depth study ofThe Make up and Materials of Football Jerseys.

-When did football jerseys start having numbers on them? Though there was documented talk of it since 1894, players did not all wear digits in a game until the 1905 Iowa State at Drake game, check this out more on this storyThe Origins Of Football Player Numbers.

-Whose college football jersey was the first to be retired? Red Grange's Number 77 Ilinois Illini jersey was the first college uni to be shelved in 1925. There were a couple more about the same time and we chatted with a college football expert historian help divulge College Football and its First Retired Jerseys.

-Who are some of the most famous NFL players at each jersey number? From Red Grange's jersey number 77 to Tom Brady's iconic number 12, a slew of NFL players made their digits proud. Want to know more? You are in the right place as we covered all 100 jersey numbers and the best to wear each:About Football By Numbers.