Football History

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The modern-day football helmet seems to be changing almost annually to make the game safer. At no time since the inception of wearing protective headgear did it change more drastically than when leather helmets were replaced with the new plastic technology?

One of the top experts in early football rules history Timothy P. Brown joins us in the discussion to chat about the transition of the material composition of helmets. Timothy Brown's FootballArchaeology.com has a daily football factoid that he shares that is really quite interesting in a short read.

This chat is based on Tim's original Tidbit titled: Transitioning from Leather to Plastic.

-Transcribed Leather to Plastic Helmets with Timothy Brown

Hello, my football friends, this is Darin Hayes of PigskinDispatch.com. Welcome once again to The Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history. And we like to look down that portal every Tuesday and go into some football archaeology with our friend Tim Brown of that very site, Football Archaeology. Tim Brown, welcome back to The Pig Pen.

Hey, Darin. Thanks for having me back. Looking forward to chatting once again.

Yeah, we are really enjoying these these Tuesday meetings that we have and, you know, talking about some different aspects of football that are sort of some of them are a little out there. They're not directly related to the game. Some are very directly related to the game, but they're all very interesting indeed, and we really appreciate you sharing these with us.

Yeah. You know, I just love football in all dimensions, including the technical side of the game, the fan experience, and how it's handled in the media. And so equipment and uniforms, all that kind of stuff.

And so, you know, I just try to approach it from a different place, you know, every couple of days to, you know, basically try to mix it up, you know, try to do some different things. Well, I'm glad you said you would like to talk about the uniforms and some of the equipment because I think that's a subject I'd like to discuss today because you had a recent tidbit out, and you called it the transition from leather to plastic. It's one of those things that's not directly involved in the game of football, but it's such an important element of it and such a big change that happened to the game.

And I'd sure like to hear about it. Yeah, well, I mean, I think the development of plastic helmets and then, you know, metal-reinforced face masks is one of the defining elements of today's game. And so, I mean, obviously, a lot happened before that, but the game just has changed dramatically as a result of that development.

So, you know, I think the thing that's that, you know, maybe people don't recognize it when they, with the Intercollegiate Football Association, adopted word for word effectively, adopted the rugby rules in 1876. I mean, they changed three or four rules, but nothing, nothing really significant. Well, one of the rules that came along from rugby was a rule that basically said that you could not players could not wear anything that had a hard substance.

And they cited a substance called gutta-percha, which was some kind of rosin or, you know, it was basically like what we might think of as an early plastic. And, you know, it came off of trees from Indonesia or whatever. But so, you know, anything that was hard could not be worn on the uniform.

So, you know, all the protective gear early on was soft leathers. Right. So when they had any kind of head harness, there's a softer leather is heavily padded, both on the outside and inside.

You know, the shoulder pads that they wore were, you know, fairly just pads filled with felt and horsehair and things like that. They used a little bit of sole leather, which is harder leather, on helmets for a little bit around the turn of the last century. And then they got rid of those.

They basically outlawed them. So so then, you know, football went, you know, continued with this no hard substances thing and then, you know, for decades. And then they kind of started allowing a little bit more sturdy helmets.

Right. Those still those tended to be fairly soft on the outside. But then in 1940, Rydell introduced plastic helmets and Northwestern was first team to wear them.

A few other teams had them early on. And then they also the U.S. Army got a hold of them and actually borrowed helmets from West Point and then basically modified it. And then Rydell became a supplier to the Airborne.

So, you know, Airborne trainees wore Rydell football helmets when they were jumping out of airplanes. You know, you see images of that here and there. But so, the football helmet preceded the crash helmet that the pilots were wearing.

Yeah. So until then, you know, there were people who tried, you know, I mean, if you think about the early guys in planes flying around like gliders. All right.

There was a if you were if you're going to hit the ground, you were really going to hit the ground. And so, you know, they tried to do tried to wear various types of pads on their head. But again, it was more like a football helmet.

And a lot of them, you think about the World War one ace and Snoopy and everything, you know, they're just wearing a leather kind of hood. But so they ended up. They started, you know, they used the because of World War two supply issues, they really couldn't produce any more civilian helmets.

So it really wasn't until after World War two that the helmets kicked in the plastic ones. And so they they were adopted pretty, pretty quickly. But there were still a lot of people holding out there.

You know, folks who just thought these things were too hard. They're causing a lot of injuries. Most guys didn't wear face masks at the time.

So, you know, you got hit in the face by a hard helmet. You know, that didn't feel that good. So and, you know, that's, I think, part of the reason why additional people started wearing face masks.

But yeah, I mean, it was just there was this constant battle of should we retain more of the rugby element where you don't pad up and then let the game go wherever it goes, or do we try to protect players from, you know, I mean, what the plastic helmet did was it protected people from skull fractures. Right. I mean, the leather helmet did that to some extent, but not really.

Plastic helmets did do that, but again, they came at the cost of now you're hitting somebody else with a hard plastic helmet. And then coaches started teaching, you know, spearing and things like that. And, you know, some of the blocking changed to take advantage of the hard helmet.

But they eventually outruled all of that or outlawed all of that. So anyway, it was just kind of an interesting period of time. And, you know, really, I think basically by 61 or 62, pretty much everybody had been switching over to plastic helmets.

You can still buy them, but you can still buy leather, is what I meant. But typically, it was, they're selling, you know, pretty much all over or all. So, it was such a long period of time to, you know, like over a decade, it sounds like maybe a couple of decades for that transition; it wasn't like a wide sweeping change where they, you know, the rules maker said next year, everybody wears plastic helmets.

So you had games for probably some participants were wearing leather and some were wearing plastic. Is that true? Oh yeah. Yeah.

And in fact, so the this, that, that tidbit about the transitioning from leather to plastic, there's an image or two that shows some guys wearing the old leather helmets with the straps, you know, crossing the head or crossing the, you know, the top of the helmet. And then other guys, what's clearly a plastic helmet. So, you know, I think through probably 1949, 50, you would see a lot of that.

And then after that, it became, you know, there were just certain people who just, Hey, this is a helmet I always wore. I wore it in high school. So I'm going to continue wearing it.

You had guys who didn't wear helmets at all. You know, you had the Tommy McDonald's of the world, um, in the NFL who didn't wear a helmet. Um, so, but you know, I think there were just some old school coaches who didn't, you know, who just thought that the, the leather helmet was safer.

Um, I think they were wrong, but that's what they thought, you know? So, um, but the, you know, the other thing was that you know, the, you know, the leather helmet, there was like, it kind of, it wasn't a suspension system, but there were, you know, there was padding inside of it, then, the early plastic helmets were all suspension systems, you know, and I don't know if you ever wore one of those, but I did, you know, and there was, you know, it didn't offer anywhere near as much protection as the padded and the airfield ones that, you know, I was able to wear a little bit later. Um, but you know, the other thing that, you know, you, you mentioned about, you know, there wasn't a rule that said you had to wear a plastic helmet, um, that still really didn't come into place. Um, the, um, the national testing organization, I think it's people call it Noxie, but N O C S A E always got the little stamp on the back of the helmet.

Um, that opened its doors in 68, started certifying helmets in 73. And it wasn't until 78 that the NCAA required anyone playing in a game to have one of those stickers on their helmet. That's I didn't realize it was as recent as that.

I was thinking it was back in the fifties or sixties, but yeah, very interesting. That, you know, it was, um, you know, there was, there was a lot of, you know, testing, a lot of universities were involved in testing the helmet quality. Um, Wayne state, uh, here in the Detroit area was big.

Michigan was big on it. Uh, North Carolina was big on it. So, you know, there were various, um, uh, Northwestern did a bunch of.

Uh, testing in the early sixties with like sensors to measure how hard, you know, the level of contact and, you know, the strength of the hits that were occurring. So, anyway, it was all academic research. And so it wasn't until somewhere in the seventies that they really kind of figured out and had a reasonable set of standards that they could even try to enforce.

Isn't it kind of interesting that, uh, sort of the more things change, the more they stay the same? Now we are seeing teams; all the NFL teams, I think, had to wear the guardian cap over their hard shell, which is a softening. I'm not sure exactly what the materials, but I know it's, it's like a dead deadens, any blows that you take it to the head, uh, where you, you know, instead of having that impact, you know, hard plastic, the hard plastic, whatever the materials they make them out of now.

And, uh, it almost goes back to those days of the, the leather of, you know, that impact, but you still have the hard shell underneath it to give that extra protection. So I'm actually, uh, writing an article on the history of the pad, you know, the external pads, uh, just, you know, partly driven by, you know, kind of the prevalence of the, the guardian, uh, pads, but, you know, so it's, it's an interesting thing. There was a Cornell did a lot of development work on that and, you know, their, their students or their players wore, I think it was just a strip, um, you know, through the middle, but the challenge that they had initially with the external padding was, um, that the, like if it's plastic to plastic, it's fairly clean hit boom.

It's that's it. Whereas with the padding that they had then the, the two helmets stayed in contact with one another and increased the force and increased some of the torque. So that was part of the reason why that never really went forward.

And I think that's probably still part of the case, but I know I'm not enough of a technologist to know that. Just as a side note, I think you probably remember the pro caps in the 1990s. I think a couple of members of the Buffalo Bills wore them.

Um, they were the sort of like that, um, almost like a styrofoam, almost like a wrestling mat type material that you'd put over the top of the helmet. Those were made, uh, or actually found by a guy about five, 10 miles from here, founded them here near Pennsylvania. And they were making those.

So, but never, never took off though. Well, actually I think it's called the thing was called materials called Insolite, but that's the stuff that Cornell initially put on top of their helmets and then Ohio state, Oklahoma, Duke, others use them. Um, that was also Insolite was the first material used to create the initial like wrestling mats that weren't made of horsehair and felt and all that stuff.

So, there's a connection between the two. I mean, it was sort of what I described as a wrestling mat. I wasn't too far off then.

Oh, very interesting. Well, Tim, you did it once again, you educated us on something that was a little bit off the beaten path that, uh, maybe us football fans wouldn't pay attention to, but you're keen. I caught another one and we appreciate that.

Uh, why don't you let folks know, uh, where, where they can find more of your material and, uh, follow you on social media? Yeah. So, um, you can just find me at, uh, footballarchaeology.com. Uh, there's an option.

There's always an option to subscribe. And if you subscribe, you'll get the content into your email box whenever I post anything, which is at least once a day. Um, otherwise follow me on Twitter.

Um, and again, just look for football archaeology, and you should be able to find me. Okay. Tim Brown and football archaeology.

Thank you very much. Once again, we'll talk to you next week.

Okay, cool. Thanks, Darin.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.

-Frequently Asked Questions

-Who was the first player to wear a football helmet? We have your answer in our in-depth study ofthe first to wear a helmet.

-What is the history of each college team and their helmet designs? Check out many of them with our series College Football helmet history of schools.

-How come some teams have player numbers on their helmets? We asked this question too and had a college football expert historian help divulge helmet numbers history.

-Why do some teams like Michigan and Delaware look so odd and similar? It's really uncanny isn't it that the Wolverines and Blue Hens look the same, check this out for a reason when helmets had wings.

-What do stickers on college football helmets mean? Some of them look really crazy but there is some goos reason for the extra adornments and we have the scoop Why all the stickers on some football helmets?.

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The Football Archaeology of the Football Men Who Endorsed and helped Goldsmith Sporting Goods to make football equipment in 1935.

Helmets are probably the first piece of equipment we think of when someone asks us about football. The head covering may be the most recognizable element of the gridiron.

Timothy Brown, like many of us, is enamored by the evolution of the football helmet as a product and safety device. Tim collects football catalogs selling the equipment and then dives into the variations and innovations that were derived along the way.

In a recent post, 1935 GoldSmith Sports Equipment Consulting Staff, Tim delved into the 1935 Coaching Consultants and reps that GoldSmith had and then came on to share what he found with us on a podcast episode.

-Transcription of 1935 GoldSmith Sports Equipment Consulting Staff with Timothy Brown

Hello, my football friends, this is Darin Hayes of PigskinDispatch.com. Welcome once again to The Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history, and welcome to another Tuesday as we get to visit with our friend Timothy P. Brown of FootballArcheology.com. Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen.

Thank you, sir. Look forward to chatting again, as always, and hopefully we'll have something interesting for people to listen to.

Yeah, you, Tim, you have some amazing things happening, you know, each and every day, and every once in a while you get some of these zingers that like, just like, I can't call it an earworm, I don't know what it is, it just, it stays with me all day when I read it. I read it in the evening and it stays with me through the night. I'm laying in bed thinking about it, wake up next morning, and one of those is, you keep going into the Goldsmith's catalog, and you had one that, you know, that you had back in September out as a tidbit that talks about some staff that Goldsmith's catalog got some information from, so maybe you could talk a little bit about that tonight.

Yeah, so, you know, so I guess, you know, first off, just, you know, by way of background, I have something on the order, you know, 30 or 40 vintage sporting goods catalogs, you know, so I collect them over time, or I've collected them over time, it's just a way to be able to look up, okay, well, you know, some of it's just images, you know, for the tidbits, but it's also just, you know, you can look at them and understand, okay, this is what this equipment was made of at the time, and how things changed and things that they created that disappeared because they didn't really work very well, or they were uncomfortable, you know, whatever it may have been. Anyways, I collect these catalogs, and most of them, I'm just, you know, I'm buying them online, and so I don't, typically, I'm only seeing like cover photographs, a couple of inside pages, but I don't know what, you know, it's not like, you know, it can be a 90 page catalog, but I'm only seeing images of a couple of them. Anyways, this was one of those, you know, I bought this, Goldsmith was a big brand at the time, and I didn't have a lot of Goldsmith catalogs, so I, you know, picked this one up.
And, you know, then once it was delivered, it was like, right away, okay, this is really cool, because in addition to just normal pages, showing the equipment, the pricing and everything for shoulder pads and helmets and whatever, each of the different major types of equipment, they had a lead in cartoon page that kind of told the history of that type of equipment, the history of football shoes, the history of helmets. And so, it was, number one, it's just kind of fun imagery, they're interesting cartoons. So, it was just a way to, you know, kind of go through those, and then, you know, what I've done, you know, it's a series of, there will be an eighth week now, but, you know, so it's just a way to publish, to do these, show these cartoons, and then just go through the equipment of the time.

And so, this is mid-30s, you know, so what was equipment like, you know, then. And so, this, the first of those cartoons was about what they called their consulting staff. And so, that was, you know, essentially, consulting staff was like, the coaches, and one trainer, who were their, like, their advisory staff, they were the guys who they would go to, to talk through, you know, what kinds of changes do we need for the equipment, or if they had a research and development group, they would show them, they'd show these coaches, hey, here's what we've come up with, what do you think about this? Can you have you guys wear this stuff in spring practice, or in regular practice, and see how it performs? You know, so they were, you know, obviously, these coaches were paid.

And in many cases, they, that, you know, the manufacturers would then, you know, just like your old baseball gloves, where it was like, the Mickey Mantle glove, or whatever, you know, there were, there were pants, and helmets, and footballs, that had the Newt Rockne name on it, or who met Pop Warner, and John Heisman, and, you know, so. Well, Tim, was, was Goldsmith, were they sort of in the Midwest? Is that what I'm getting a sense of? Or what part of the country were they centered out of? You know, a lot of the coaches that are on this advisory staff are Midwest guys. So, I kind of get a sense of that.

But, you know, there was a lot of Midwest, like D&M was out east, they were like a Massachusetts firm, but Spalding was Midwest, Reach, I believe, was Midwest, or a couple down in St. Louis. So, yeah, I don't have that catalog in front of me. But I could, you know, I could look, look it up.

And I can, you know, let you know, you know, kind of where they were based. Yeah, that's, that's what I was, Is there a reason you ask her? Well, I know that Spalding was out of Chicago, and it just seemed, you know, and it seems like, like you said, this, a lot of these coaches are Midwestern teams, Western Conference, Big Ten teams. And I just wondering, you know, if there was a reason why maybe, you know, distribution or something that they were in the center of the country because you really, you think about that area, you know, football starting in the east and moving west, you'd almost think the equipment would be more of an eastern-based, you know, industrial shipping out.

But just curious. Yeah, I think, well, my understanding is a lot of it was the stockyards in Chicago, you know, so there was access to leather. Okay, you know, so I mean, so much of the early equipment, yeah, so much of the early equipment was leather, that, you know, it made more sense to be where you could pick and choose and get high-grade leathers and yada, yada, yada.

So, yeah, I mean, it's funny, it's one of those things you wouldn't even think is, you know, there's no reason anymore, you know, to be near a source of leather.
Obviously, you know, baseball gloves are a different story. But otherwise, you know, most football equipment, there's no leather involved anymore.

And then the ball, you know, obviously, the balls were leather. So anyways, yeah, that's, that's why I love it, you know, started in the Midwest. That makes perfect sense.

Okay, thanks. Yeah, so, so then, you know, like these coaches were, you know, the folks that they had on at that point, so in 1935, they had a Hunk Anderson, who was at North Carolina State, but it just finished a tour at Notre Dame. So Midwest, then he had played at Notre Dame.

Noble Kizer was at Purdue. Fritz Crisler was at Princeton, but he had been at, he had played at Uof Chicago. He had coached Minnesota before going to Princeton.

And then obviously ended up at Michigan. Doc Spears had been all over. Well, he kind of he was a journeyman, he was actually a doctor, but a football coach, but he was at Wisconsin at the time.

And I can't remember if he had just gone there. I think he got fired after that, and then went out to Oregon, or it could have been the other way around. And then this guy, Frank Major Wandel, from Yale, who was, he was one of those interesting guys at the time, there were a lot of, it's kind of like, you know, there are these strength and conditioning coaches now who are, you know, kind of, they have their own brand, they're, they're nationally known, nationally recognized guys.

And, you know, back then, there were trainers like that, too. And he was one of them. So he'd been longtime trainer at West Point, and he ends up down at, I think it was LSU for a couple of years.

Then he ends up at Yale, which is where he was at at the time. So, so actually, the mix isn't that much Midwestern. But it's interesting, because the image that you have, and folks, if you've got to enjoy these images that Tim's talking about, we have link in the show notes, you can go to Tim's page and see some of these, he's talking about these cartoons.

But Major Wandel, you know, everybody else is sort of wearing like white knickers. And he's got like, I don't know if they're plaid knickers, or, but that's what jumps out of you on the page to me, is these knickers. And it's he's in the lower right hand corner of the page I'm looking at, but he must have been a character to have some like looks like he's golfing, maybe.

Yeah, I mean, he's one of those guys who just like came out of some gym in New Jersey, and ended up eventually hooking in with, he did some training, you know, during World War One, and then ends up at West Point for quite a while. But yeah, I mean, back then, trainers were function both. They handled both the kind of sports medicine side, you know, they weren't physicians.

But when we think about athletic training, we're thinking about, you know, hot baths, and cold baths, and, you know, taping guys, and, you know, some kind of contraption, you know, so it doesn't hurt, as well as strength and condition. So they were both at the time, and mostly conditioning, they didn't do as much strength work. But yeah, a lot of these guys were, you know, they're big on the whole, getting guys to roll on the ground to toughen them up.

Things that we now think are pretty absurd, but, you know, that was kind of core beliefs at the time. Yeah, I can remember back when I was playing when I was, like, I think the first year I played, maybe I was in fifth grade or something. I remember our coach, he was old school.

He was an older guy. And you'd have part of your calisthenics, you'd run in place, and then drop and make sure your stomach hits first, because that's going to toughen your gut up, you know, as everybody gets the wind knocked out of when you hit the ground, and you're gasping trying to get back up. But I picture that kind of training.

Yeah, that was the deal. But one of the things I thought was kind of cool, I can't remember, you know, which eater left this as a comment or a question, but, you know, I'm a Purdue fan. And, you know, there were a lot of schools back in the 30s that wore winged helmets, right? I mean, we now associated with just a select few schools.

But back then, it was very common. Nevertheless, you know, this guy made a comment that you know, back in the 30s, mid-30s, in particular, Purdue wore winged helmets, you know, so wing in front straps, you know, going back, kind of, you know, the Michigan, Delaware, Princeton style now. But she's like, so that's where you know because Noble was one of these advisory coaches.

And so I would bet if you look at images of the Purdue team from that era, there probably weren't some, some form of Goldsmith helmet, right? So as opposed to some competitive brand. So anyways, but for him, it was kind of a neat insight because it's like, so that's why they were those, those stupid. Now, with these coaches, sort of being on the board of directors, or the consultants of the now the day, is that, you know, their teams buy all their equipment from a Goldsmith, then is that was that's part of the deal of, you know, I've never really seen anything that goes into the details of those kinds of contracts.

I mean, I've read a few things about Knute Rockne because he was like, I mean if you think that there's somebody that, that is on every commercial nowadays, like, you know, save been, you know, down in Alabama's on a fair amount of stuff. But Rockne was, I mean, he was pitching, obviously, all kinds of athletic equipment. And then he pitched Ramblers or Studebakers, you know, one of those brands, he made coffee, he did all you know, stuff for Kelloggs, a lot of stuff for Kelloggs, and they had coffee at the time.

I just thought Barbasol was big on Barbasol. So he was from a Holmes and Travis Kelsey, eat your hearts out. Newt Rocky was first.

That's right. Major sponsor ambassador. Yeah.

Okay, so well, yes. Did the coach or did the teams buy that brand of equipment? And so I've never really, you know, I've never seen anything definitive. In that regard, and I have this kind of a storyline I've never checked into.

You know, I have read a number of things with Newt Rocky and his, you know, he, he promoted a lot of different kinds of consumer goods, but then also a lot of football equipment. So I mean, I have to believe that they, at minimum, they benefited from the, you know, they got discounts on the equipment, and in some cases, free stuff in order to test it, you know, it had to be that kind of thing going on. But, you know, the research I've done in the past about, you know, like when logos first came, you know, when logos became prominent in the 60s, really Adidas, you know, among track athletes that whole thing got going, and they were, you know, giving away equipment, paying athletes to wear their branded goods.

So that's really where that started. But there were probably, you know, less, you know, maybe a little bit less formal, you know, kinds of, you know, deals in the past, right? You know, yeah, I'm just picturing like a high school coach or athletic director saying, Hey, you know, Fritz Kreisler's endorsing this product, goldsmith, we better write our equipment there, because, you know, we're, we're Fritz Kreisler fans, or, you know, you know, Hunky Anderson fans, whatever, you know, they see they're endorsing it. And, you know, that's probably a lot of the attraction from for having them on the covers.

Yeah. And, you know, I'm sure they got that they got paid something just like, you know, the baseball gloves. And, you know, those athletes got things, and somehow they get money when their gloves are sold.

Right. So right. But, you know, the details of it, I don't understand, or, you know, really know anything about.

I wonder, I picture, you know because you have some great images of the helmets. I wonder maybe, you know, we can look back at some old photographs. Maybe I'll do that in some spare time here and look and see if you can tell a goldsmith helmet from, you know, a Spalding or some of the other manufacturers.
And maybe you can tell that way and say, Hey, you know, Purdue was wearing a goldsmith in 37 or. Yeah. And yeah.

Well, even in that article, I did do that. I couldn't find a good sharp image of the Princeton team from that era to see, well, what helmet they wore? Well, in fact, what I, the only thing I really found was a, it was a painting or an illustration from a year, you know, Princeton yearbook. And the helmets of Princeton players are wearing what we think of as a classic winged helmet.

It was. There's a helmet style. It kind of looks like, now I'm blanking on the term, but it's kind of like a three-leaf clover sort of design. It's, you know, so anyway, but, you know, and Goldsmith offered that helmet and, or that style of helmet, but I think others did as well.

So sometimes it's hard to tell like what brand, because, you know, people, you know, they, they wore, you know, they had similar designs, you know, different brands. Okay. Gotcha.

All right. So go ahead and continue. Yeah.

Well, I was mostly just gonna say, I'm not sure, you know, I'm just, I put together some notes in advance. And so I don't know that I had had anything else. I mean, other than just one of the things that's pretty remarkable, as in all the catalogs or in all the different products, is it like on helmets, you could go from, like, say, a $15 helmet down to like one that costs $2 and 35 cents.

So the, you know, they, they end up having these high end helmets, and then, then there's kind of moderately priced ones, and then there's pretty inexpensive helmets. And so you just gotta, you know, it's like now, every helmet has to meet a certain base at least, you know, performance level, you know, based on Noxi. But, you know, back then, it was like, well, no, we, this is a helmet, it's good.

You know, but there's no measurement standards or anything. It's just like you're taking somebody's word for it. Yeah, that leads into one of the questions I was gonna ask you because the the ad for the helmets that you have on this tidbit, you know, it has three examples of helmets that they were promoting.

And all of them say leather lined. Now, what would be the alternative to leather-lined in that era? Would it be like, you know, cloth or something? Or, you know? Yeah, I think the internals were either leather or felt for the most part. And so you'll, you'll also see things.

You pretty much have to look at the less expensive ones to get a handle on the alternatives. For example, moleskin was kind of a high-end material for pants. It was not as popular in the 1930s, but it was still a high-end material.

Canvas was a low-end material. And then there might be different kinds of twills and maybe duck and whatever. I don't even know what some of those things really are, that they're one form of cotton, you know, material or another, but then by the 30s, you were getting into, you know, silk, and a lot of times it's like airplane cloth, which is actually a form of silk.

So silk, and then I'm blanking on the kind of the really shiny material that satin, you'd see that satin, yeah, it's so you'd see satin on the front of you know, certain, certain teams pants. So yeah, I mean, some of it was once they got into some of the, the not-so-like silk, one of the real values of it was lighter, much more water repellent, you know, so it didn't soak up sweat and, you know, water in a rainy situation. So the players, you know, felt lighter, but it also silk is much easier to dye.

And you can do a much broader range of colors, whereas the duck and canvas pretty much always had earth tones, you know, one or tone or another. So everybody wore kind of the same look in pants until New York versus wearing purple pants. So, you know, I mean, it's, you think about it, that was a big deal.

Awesome. Somebody, hey, they're wearable pants. Right? Yeah, I was just trying to go when you were saying, you know, that from the $15 helmet down to the $2 and 35 cent helmet, I'm picturing, you know, hey, you know, varsity players, you get the $15 helmet with a leather lined and freshmen, you're going to get the burlap lined helmets, you know, uncomfortable.

Yeah, well, I'm sure that sure that was short, obviously, the freshmen who were wearing the stuff, those latest and greatest 10 years ago. Right. And the thing on some of that is, I was looking at, so I'm still writing, you know, writing one of these, and it there's, there's kind of like a flap in the back between kind of the ear hole area in the back.

It's got some kind of flexible extension, some kind of elastic band there. So there was that part of the sizing. If you look at the catalog, sometimes not a lot is said about helmet sizing.

And so, you know, I always had a big old water bucket head. So I needed a big helmet. I've got a younger brothers, you know, got a pinhead.

And, you know, so, but presumably, we would have been issued the same helmet. So, yeah, I'm sure they had some kind of size variations, but, you know, they don't talk about much of the catalog size variations. You had to stuff some straw or a rag in the back or something to make it stay on your head.

Tim, that's a fascinating stuff. And you've, you've got a lot of these goldsmiths that you've been coming out as you said, you had an eight-part series on it, but you have a lot of other interesting stuff coming out, you know, seven days a week. Maybe you could share with folks how they could get in touch with you to learn about your tidbits and read them each and every day.

Yeah. So, you know, so my preferring would be that it just visits the site and you subscribe. And, you know, that way, basically if you're subscribed, you can, you'll get the, you'll get the tidbit by email every night.

Cause I assume it's seven o'clock Eastern. If you, if you're a Substack reader, you can also just get it and follow me on Substack. And then, you know, you'll, you'll be able to get them every night.

Some people don't want the email, but there you go. They like getting it on Substack. I also, at least for now, tweet it every night.

And then I also posted on the application threads. So me on one of those, it's always Football Archaeology. You know, if you enter that, you'll find me.

And then it's kind of like happy reading. All right. Well, Timothy Brown, thank you.
Once again, footballarchaeology.com is the place to go and we appreciate you, sir. And we will talk to you again next Tuesday.

Very good.

Thank you. Thanks, Tim.

Transcribed by TurboScribe

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The practice of stealing signs in football has been a contentious issue for decades, a subtle game within the game that can drastically alter the outcome of a match. While the exact origins are shrouded in time, it's safe to say that as soon as teams began using signals to communicate plays, opponents sought to decipher them.

In the early days of football, sign stealing was often a matter of keen observation and deduction. Coaches and players would watch for subtle cues, such as hand gestures, formations, or even the way a quarterback looked at his receivers. As the sport evolved, so too did the methods of sign stealing. The advent of technology, particularly video cameras, opened up new avenues for teams to gain an edge.

Timothy P. Brown of Football Archaeology visits us in this episode to share the story of the nefarious and unethical item of the pigskin's history.

If you love the football talk on history and evolution, then you should check out the original article Tim wrote : A History of Signal Stealing in College Football.

In addition to the video above, you can also get the podcast audio version for your listening enjoyment at: The History of Stealing Signs in American Football.

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The Horween family has been a cornerstone in the world of football for generations. Ralph and Arnold Horween, brothers and entrepreneurs, took over a business founded by their father Isadore, the Horween Leather Company, in Chicago in 1920. Their dedication to crafting high-quality leather has led to their products becoming synonymous with the NFL.

Timothy P. Brown of Football Archaeology visits us in this episode to share the story of this family that has quite a story in gridiron history and the present day.

If you love the football talk on history and evolution, then you should check out the original article Tim wrote The Horween Brothers and the NFL.

You may also be interested in the podcast version of our conversation found at: The Horween Family.

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Have you ever stopped to think about the iconic flip-down markers used to signal first downs in football? Today on the podcast, we delve into the fascinating history of this sideline staple with special guest historian Timothy Brown!

Timothy Brown of FootballArchaeaology.com a renowned expert on the evolution of sports equipment, joins us to explore.

Today's episode and discussion is based on Tim's original post titled:Col. Roy C. Baker And The Flip-Style Down Marker .

We also have this available in podcast form The Flip-Style Down Marker Innovation of Colonel Baker.

So please sit down and relax and enjoy the gridiron lore!

Flip-Style Down Marker with Timothy Brown

Hello my football friends, this is Darin Hayes of pigskindispatch.com. Welcome once again to the Pigpen, your portal of positive football history, and welcome to another Tuesday where we have our friend Timothy P Brown, a footballarchaeology.com, to tell us about another aspect of football history. Maybe He's not mainstream and we don't know much about but we're gonna learn something today Tim. Welcome back to the Pigpen.

Hey, it's very good to see you, and I think this Podcast will Have people flipping out.

Well, I'm definitely flipping out about it because you put your subject matter that you're gonna talk about today as something That's near and dear to my heart being a former official something that I used quite a bit You had an article back in May called Colonel Roy Baker and the flip style downed Marker Now this is something I'm very familiar with in my early days of officiating and love to hear the history of it.

Yeah well, you know, so Depending on when the listeners came of age in terms of their football fandom You know if they're some kind of young and they might only remember the louvered down markers where you know the guy the dial-a-downs Yeah, the dial-a-downs exactly and But before that There were a whole, you know, there are a number of different Variations on you know first there were chains and then they you know created down markers that or down boxes Which initially were just boxes, you know on a stick with a one two, three or four on the four sides of the box And so but none of those were entirely satisfactory because you know Depending on which direction you had the down Marker pointing then somebody was If they were in a different position in the stadium or on the field, they they saw a different number So there was always some confusion There and this isn't a lot of times in the days before there were really effective scoreboards that would tell you the down so There's this guy Roy C Baker Who was a 1932 South Dakota grad? Who's an ROTC there? He was a cheerleader. I didn't find any information about him playing Football in high school or college, but I suspect he played in high school.

He was from a small town in South Dakota. So I'm sure they needed every athlete that they could get, you know. Seems like a fairly athletic guy, so, you know, he graduates from South Dakota in 32, and he taught for a couple of years in, You know, South Dakota High School, but then he moves to Wyoming, and he at each of those places he's you know, these are small Small community high schools. He's the football coach and the basketball coach and, you know, pretty successful in both. You know, sometimes a little tough in the first year or two that he was coaches, But you know, he had some pretty good teams, especially in basketball, actually. But you know, for whatever reason, in the late 30s, he became dissatisfied with the way that the down boxes worked in Football, and Football had tried a lot of different solutions.

They were different. You know, now we're using chips, I guess, but they, you know, They tried different things like surveying kind of tools to line it up properly, And you know, some kind of crazy things to try to get, you know, accurate accuracy but though but His solution was much more focused on the fans and the players on the field than just the visibility of the down on the down Marker, so he's the guy who came up with the flip-style down And you know, he kind of prototyped it just using sheets of paper And if you think about it And I can wrote about it. I kind of went through the sequence in the written article, But it's like okay, so the on one side of the sheet has to be Matched with a two on the other side and then a two match with three and a three-match the four and then a four-match with a one in order for the numbers to correspond so both sides are displaying either one or two or three or four and So he figured that out it's like so obvious to anybody who looks at it, you know like And it's like why didn't anybody think of that and the numbers got to be upside down to the number on the other side Because you're flipping it over. Yeah.

Yeah, so, but I mean, he Used a couple of sheets of paper to figure it out, and boom. He made it so then he had, you know, he started having them produced in metal at a local, you know, sheet metal shop and Painting them up, and then he started selling them, you know, no locally, but he also sold one to the University, Nebraska So that was maybe his breakthrough where you know people start noticing this thing and And he files for a patent in 41 he gets the patent in like April of 42 Like two weeks later, you know, I said earlier he was an ROTC in college and he he was In the Army Reserves throughout that time, you know so World War two had just started so he gets called up So now he you know, it's gives up his teaching job joins, you know heads into the army and While he was in the army during World War two others started producing His flip style down markers and then selling them through the big sporting goods companies So he gets back to the States, you know, he was in Europe during the war. He gets back to states, and You know, They're using these flip-style down markers all over the place.

So he goes to some lawyers, and they basically say, well, You know, this isn't like a high dollar value product. You're probably not gonna get much out of suing these people because he had told that he told the companies, Hey, you're violating my patent, and they had said sue me, right? So, you know, he ended up just deciding not to pursue it for whatever reason but mostly on the lawyer's advice, So he never really got anything out of it. You know, he came up with this concept, which is brilliant in its simplicity, right? And really, the only recognition that he got was in 83 when the Redskins were in We're heading into the Super Bowl. He was profiled in the Washington Post with an article, you know, basically telling the story that he had, you know about what had happened to him.

So that article is helpful to me. But what, you know, obviously I had to go figure out his background, the high schools and all that kind of stuff, but the other thing just about this story is it's one of those where a lot of times some of my favorite stories are this came about because I mean I kind of you know, I've written a bunch of stuff in the past about these various downmarket attempts and but this one came about because An in-law relative of his Reached out to me and said hey, do you know about this guy this Roy C Baker? I was like, no, never heard of him, and But then once I do, you know, once I googled or used newspapers.com to look for That Washington Post article popped up, and then it was just like, you know, Katie bar the door, you know so anyways I just I love the stories where it's connected to somebody's relative a son a daughter grandchild whatever Who's like? You know, trying to figure out what the truth is behind their Ancestor story, or they're Giving the guys some recognition for a great invention to get credited for run paid for, But you know, really, I would guess from at least the early 50s, you know from then on Until the dial-a-down came around and that was like 87 or so I think is when that first came up the flip style down Marker was the downmarket I mean, you didn't see anything else on a football field So especially when they went to plastic, I know I know when I first started officiating in the 80s We had metal ones. There were some plastic ones out there But the plastic ones were great, especially like in our area when you started officiating you would be for varsity games You would hold the chains and do the downmarkers for the varsity game watching the more senior officials do it So you get those cold days in like October November and you're I mean you're holding it a metal pole So your hand gets close you have a glove on you're trying to do it one-handed But the the plastic ones are nice because you could just shake the the pat the pole a little bit and it would flip it You know, you could if you did just write it up and you'd have to use both hands to flip the thing around So we love the plastic ones Yeah, well, but you know, I mean I think anybody who watched Football and For whatever 30 40 year period You know the flipped style downmarker was the only thing out there Yeah, I mean, I I don't even remember seeing a dial down till probably the mid 90s in our area You know, everybody still had the plastics and especially lower level games.

They still use the plastics. I think yeah because those would have been more expensive. Yeah, And it's like, do you really need to replace something that works because it still works? You know, the flip-style would still work just fine, so now going back in before the flip style when they had the Traditional boxes, you know when I've we've all seen images of them, you know, I know there are some collectors on the vintage Collector community that we're in that some guys have them Walks and like you said you did they were down done they did they should where did they show the correct down? There was it to the players on the field point. It pointed to the field of a second down to two facing the field. That's right.

Okay, and so, you know, the funny thing originally when they first were doing the down rod, initially was just a rod, and the Headlinesman actually Carried it around with him on the field, and I, you know, So I've got pictures out there. I did another tidbit on this, but with a bunch of pictures of guys running up and down the field these rods, so originally, they didn't have any kind of box or anything. It was just, you know, that it allowed them to kind of stick it into the ground, and You know, you'd think they would have left it there. But anyway, they'd pick it up.

They'd pick it up and run with it, and then they started putting the boxes on the poles, but those were still, you know, like maybe up to waist height, you know, they just weren't very tall. Then finally they put them up a top a pole that like rose above The assistant linesman's head, you know, so eventually it got turned over to the assistant linesman and you know, they would You know, so I've got in this tidbit I've got a picture of of one of the the older stuff ones that is One that's below kind of below the waist version and then another one That's about as high as a flip down Marker would have been or even the current dial it down So, you know at least that was visible to fans, you know the the short ones, you know I mean, they were really only intended for the players and the officials because Nobody else could see it All right, I guess maybe the opposing sideline could see it in the opposing fans but you know, whoever was across the field could see it, but Nobody behind that official would be able to see it you know just a little Sidebar taken going into the world of officiating a lot of people don't know this but the officials The box is important because it's more more so for the spot of the ball and we make you know We all try to make sure because the headlinesman has his back to the chains in the box most of the time So it's usually the line judge, which is on the opposite sideline who's facing him. Let's tell them, Hey, it's you know, you're showing a two, and it's third down because officials every official has a rubber-like piece of elastic it goes on your wrist and it goes over your fingers, and People do it.

You know, some guys would do it. You know your fourth if you put the rubber band on your four fingers first down; you put it on your middle finger. Second down, I did it in did a group of fingers, you know I had the rubber band around one finger first down two fingers It was second down, and that and so you're really, and that's why we're whole the officials are holding up a number Signaling to the other officials. So we're all on the same page. Hey, it's second down. Yeah, I got second down, and then you look at the box and say, okay.

Yes, you're showing second down, So that's just how the officials do it. So I'm I don't know what they did prior to having those, you know when they had that rod, I'm sure they probably maybe did something unique like that, or I heard Some older guys that I did it started in the 50s when I started officiating they used to hold pebbles in their hands I don't know what they did with the pebble, you know they switched hands or something and did I I'm not coordinated enough to hold pebbles and You know blow a lanyard whistle that they used to have around their neck Yeah, I'd be kind of too much but that's how the officials do the downs most the times with a piece of elastic on their fingers Yeah, well, you know they like in the old catalogs. There's, You know, for a long time, they sold little, you know, hand clicker things That would have down in the distance, you know, much like an umpire would use to keep track of balls and strikes But you know, for a long time, you know again before Official signals became, you know fairly standardized You know a lot of times whoever was posting stuff on the scoreboard They were kind of guessing, you know, whether there had been a first down or not because sometimes it wasn't clear You know, the officials didn't always signal things. So the way that we just assume they're going to today So there, you know, there are games where they had the wrong score on the scoreboard, you know, for a long time, and so it was, You know, Thankfully as much as I dislike sometimes hearing the referee talk during the games it's Communications is much better today than it has been in the past Yeah, and the majority of them are pretty good at talking.

Yeah, conforming things. There are some guys that say some things. You're like one, so why would you even say that? Who knows? I just want to watch the game and not have to hear the explanation. It's not really a criticism of the officials themselves, and some of them actually have a really good sense of humor, right? Tim, you know, that is a great piece. You know, to talk about, you know, some officiating equipment, something that all of us look at when we go to a game, and you know, sometimes on television, we see it come into our view. You can see the downs so it's just kind of cool to to hear the history of that and Give some some love to the guy that invented the one probably lasted the longest of all the Down markers that flip style which you know I think everybody's familiar that's watched Football at least the last 20 years or so So, you know great piece of history there and you have some little unique pieces like this a lot on your website maybe you can share with the Folks how they can tune into some of these pieces that you have sure You know, it's just easiest thing is go to footballarchaeology.com subscribe and You know, you'll get an email every time that I yes issue a new You know have a new post you'll get an email into your box with that content alternatively follow me on Twitter on Substack or on threads You can be one of about six or seven people who follows me on threads if you want to And or you know just go on out and hit the site whenever you want, you know, whatever you want to I'll also just take a moment here to some put in a plug I've got a new book coming out called a history of the Football. So, as far as I know, it is the first book to look at the history of American Football and Canadian Football. I covered their ball as well. So, you know, it takes us back to the rugby days and then all the way up until the present. How did it change shape, size, colors, and stripes? Materials etc.

So it's just kind of a fun little read. Yeah, and I'm coming soon to an Amazon site near you. Okay, that's what I was gonna ask you if you had a date set for release, but I still do that. I do not know, but we'll get some information from you when it officially comes out. We'll make sure we share that with everybody, too. But I'm looking forward to that. Do you have any place where people can pre-order anything? I think there's some technique.

I'm running into a technical issue right now. It's just related to the cover. You know, I think in order to allow pre-order, you have to have the cover ready, okay, and so All right, so the answer is no problem, we'll just keep watching, and we'll keep posting when we know things on pigskin dispatch and keep watching Tim's Social media and everything and in footballarchaeology.com, and we'll figure out what's coming real soon So real exciting book so can't wait to get my hands on it.

So Tim, we really appreciate you coming on here and sharing, you know, aspects of this, You know, flip down and the dial it down in the box and its history, and I Love to talk to you about another aspect of football history next week.

Yeah, I will be here.

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In the rich tapestry of American football, where strategy and athleticism intertwine, there are moments when innovation pushes the boundaries of the game. One such instance is the gadget play known as the "Helmet Toss," a daring maneuver that once captivated audiences with its audacious flair. Introduced in the early days of the college game, the play involved a player taking off their helmet. While it showcased the creativity and risk-taking spirit that drives the sport, the play's inherent dangers and unpredictability led to its eventual ban by league officials. Football Archaeology.com's Timothy Brown joins us to discuss a brief yet memorable role in football history, illustrating how the pursuit of innovation can both challenge and reshape the very rules of the game.

If you love the football talk on the history and evolution, then you check out the original article Tim wrote Helmet-Tossing Trickeration.

Also check out the podcast version of our chat at They Tried This Football Gadget Play With the Helmet! Pigskin Dispatch Podcast.

-Transcribed Toss leather Helmet Trickeration with Tim Brown

Hello, my football friends; this is Darin Hayes at PigskinDispatch.com. Welcome once again to The Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history, and welcome to another edition where we get to visit Timothy P. Brown of FootballArcheology.com on a Tuesday and talk about some gridiron from yesteryear and some great aspects of the game. And Tim's got some great stories today in our edition.

Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen.

Hey, Darin. Good to see you.

And what could I use as a dad joke? I think I'm out of luck. I don't think I have anything. Yeah, I think you're tricked out.

Yeah, that's... I figured that's what you were setting yourself up for. But of course, Tim... Oh, go ahead. I'm sorry.

Well, I was just going to say that I was being the, you know, the straight man in this little comedy routine. And usually, those don't work out so well when you're the straight man, and I'm telling the jokes. Your delivery is much better than mine.

Of course, we're trying to segue into kind of very poorly, I might add, into Tim's great article that he wrote back in July 5th called The Helmet Tossing Trickeration, which, you know, sounds like a mouthful here. And I'm sure we'll have a few more laughs and learn a lot about some football here with this story. Yeah, so I will take a moment; hopefully, in the very near future, my next book, A History of the Football, will be released and available for sale by Football History Enjoying Public.

Anyways, one of the things that I cover in that book is, you know, when and why stripes arrived on the ball. And so stripes basically came, you know, appeared on footballs for two reasons. One is that they were added to help people see the ball when they played night games or when they practiced at dusk.

You know, a lot of times you just would paint a ball white or yellow, but those were slick and slippery. And so they, you know, adding a stripe, you know, they thought would allow, would cause less problems with, you know, the slickness of the ball. So part of it, white stripe or a black stripe on a white ball was just to help people see at night.

But the other thing that, the other reason was to eliminate kind of a camouflage effect. And so, you know, the stripes got added in the 20s, mostly in the 30s. But, you know, back then teams were just starting to wear white jerseys on a fairly regular basis.

Stanford was one of those teams. But so if you used a white ball at night, it was like, okay, well, the opponent was like, well, we can't see the ball because you got white jerseys. And then back, and the same thing kind of happened with the brown ball.

Teams, not many teams wore brown or tan jerseys, but almost everybody was wearing pants that were earth tones. They were khaki. So they were, you know, they were the khaki color or they were brown, or they were, you know, some kind of a greenish brownish blob.

And so it would sometimes be hard to see the ball against that background. And so, and they were also, a lot of teams were wearing, you know, that there were friction strips, but before the friction strips, they'd wear those like pieces of leather that were kind of oval looking on their jerseys. And so, so anyways, for those reasons, it was sometimes hard, you know, you'd lose sight of the ball because of the uniform that the, that the opponent was wearing.

So, so that was a problem. And in that time, there was also some trickeration that was going on. This is in the 20s and 30s, but there was another, there was an older trickeration that had occurred back in, in 1909, which is really the focus of this tidbit.

It's just taken me a little while to get there. So back in 1909, Virginia Tech and North Carolina were playing a game and Virginia Tech had three brothers named, well, their last name was Hodgson. And one of the guys was E.R. Hodgson, and he was the right guard.

Vivian Hodgson ends up, you know, scoring the first TD in the game and E.R., the guard, moves back to be the kicker. This is not him, but you know, figured I'd put a kicker out here. And so, you know, he converts the, converts the kick.

So Virginia Tech's, you know, leading. Five minutes later, Virginia Tech is on the 35 and E.R. Hodgson sets up again to kick, this time a field goal. And rather than, you know, as a snap is made, Hodgson, the kicker, pulls off his brown leather helmet, which is basically the same color as the football.

And he tosses the helmet over the right side of the line so that the, so that the NC State players would think that he was throwing a football. And instead, well, he was throwing a helmet, obviously, but the holder got the ball and he ran around the left side of the NC State line and goes for a 35-yard touchdown. So it's just, you know, this is one of these things where the helmets look enough like a football in terms of just the tanning of the leather that you could throw your helmet and people would think it was a football.

And then in the second half, he sets up again and to place kick another field goal and the ball gets snapped. Instead of going to the, to the holder, the ball gets snapped to the E.R. Hodgson, the kicker. And it's, it's hard to, you know, the, the way they describe it, it's not entirely clear whether, you know, but he handed it off to the quarterback who maybe was positioned out at a wing position.

And it was either like in a draw or a Statue of Liberty sort of play, but the quarterback went for a 75-yard run, you know. So here's poor NC State, you know, they, they thought they were playing a pretty big, pretty good game until they saw ball flying over the, the left side of the defense line, turns out to be a helmet, not a ball. And then they get the old Statue of Liberty play, which was then a new play, pulled on them.

So, you know, two long touchdown runs and unfortunately for them anyways, Virginia Tech won. But so that, that one of the other side lights to this is that these, you know, these trick plays, throwing the helmet around, you know, people continue doing that a bit. And in like the late twenties, there was some guy, I've never figured out who he is, some guy, but he apparently played somewhere in the South.

And he, he would take, he was a running back, he'd take his helmet off and toss it to the ground, you know, sometime close to being tackled, because then some of the defenders would think it was a loose ball, go for the, go for the helmet instead of the, instead of trying to tackle him. And so then that was when they implemented a rule that said every team has to paint their helmets with some kind of striping, you know, cross stripes, or like, you know, kind of like the Michigan Wolverine, you know, type of helmet. You had to have some contrasting colors painted on the top of your helmet.

So it didn't look like a football. So anyways, that's all I know. That's it.

Yeah. That's quite a mouthful there of what you just said. I mean, some great, great stories.

First of all, you almost got to think of back how almost every episode of the A team ended back in the eighties where Hannibal would say, I love it when a plan comes together. It sounds like those, those trickeration plays were to their peak performance there on both of them getting a big touchdown plays, helping them win the game. But the other thing is you almost got to think, you know, it's hard for our modern sensibilities to say, okay, a player's taken off their helmet in the middle of a play.

You know, even in between plays when they're on the field, you know, nowadays they, you know, celebration, they get 15 yard penalties. So obviously that was not the rule back in that era. Well, you didn't even have to have a helmet, you know, at that, at that point.

So, yeah, I mean, you know, people by, well, actually in like oh nine, probably most players didn't wear one. Maybe half did, it probably depended on the team, but you know, certainly in the twenties and thirties, you know, then pretty much everybody was wearing them, but um, like Tommy McDonald, dude, I think he was the last one to play without a helmet. I'm pretty sure that was him.

Maybe, maybe I'm getting him mixed up with some, no, he was the last one to play without a face mask. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. Yeah. Okay.

I think you alluded to it a little bit, and I think this is what you were talking about. If you go back, you know, back more towards the turn of the century and where the players, the standard equipment was, they were wearing like the vests, like the leather vests, you know, and you know, then the moleskin pants were that tannish color, like you're talking about in football. So I mean that era, and I think all teams were wearing, I don't think they had different color vests.

It was all the same color that had to be really challenging for a defense to be able to follow the ball and run the ball every play too. Yeah. I mean, so, you know, you basically had to rely on, you know, everybody wore long-sleeve sweaters or jerseys, and then they'd have a stripe, or they'd have socks of the same color.

So that was a primary way to tell. And it's like, you know, eventually college players kind of went to the no hose or no stocking look, you know, they just have the, but like the white sock, right. And, but back then everybody was still wearing shin guards.

And so, you know, the some, you know, early on, they'd wear them over their socks, and then they started wearing them under their socks. But I think the socks probably helped keep them on. And it was just a better look instead of having those shin guards.

But I was coming from the aspect of just trying to follow the ball when you have your midsection and your lower, you know, portions of your body are consumed the same color as the football. And, you know, there's 22 guys on the field like that. It's had to be extremely hard as a defender to follow where that ball is.

Yeah. And, you know, half the time, they were running up the gut. So it's like, you know, how they figured out who had the ball sometimes, you know, who knows.

And they weren't the nice clean fields that we see today either. I'm sure most of them were just mud pits. Yeah.

Especially the end of the season. Yeah. No doubt about it.

Yeah. Well, some interesting stuff and some things that we really have to appreciate that our football forefathers had to go through and experience both in the elements and by rules and some of the craziness of the absence of color in the uniforms and stripes on the ball that we take for granted. Of course, the NFL doesn't have the stripes, but almost every other level has some form of a stripe on there.

Now, I guess that's the other thing I'm sitting here trying to envision when you're putting stripes on balls back in the early twenties. It's not like they had, you know, masking tape and spray paint that they could put it on. So I'm assuming somebody's got to almost like detail this, you know, with a stripe with a brush and very little template.

Somebody with a steady hand and some kind of tape or something. But, you know, I mean, when the manufacturers got involved too, it was like, again, this is another thing I talk about in the book, but it's like, where do you put the stripes? Right. How many stripes? Do you have one stripe? Do you have two stripes? Do you have three stripes? Do they go just one way or do they go the long way? I mean, you know, so that there are these things that we take for granted that, well, of course, the white stripe goes there.

Well, no, that's an arbitrary place. I mean, there's probably reason why they ended up where they ended up, but, you know, I mean, they were just trying stuff, you know? So it's like, Billy, go paint white stripes on the ball. Okay, boss.

And, you know, Billy went and did it. Nobody told him how far it was supposed to be and how wide the stripes had to be or anything like that. Yeah, I think if I had to do it, it would probably look like a melted lightning bolt going around there.

I'm sure it wouldn't be going around. That'd be a tough thing to do on an odd shaped ball like that. I've got some images of the striping on the field as well that sometimes was not quite as straight as one might like.

I've experienced that in modern times when on the grass fields it's kind of hard to do measurements, that's for sure, when you have some of those crazy crooked lines in there. But, yeah, it's probably a better job than I would do, so I can't complain too much. Yeah, so, Tim, just another great way to look back at an aspect of football that it's hard for us to appreciate, but it happened and, you know, some of the things that people had to overcome playing the game that they love, just like we'd love it today, and we'd love just to hear about this history.

But you have some multi-times a week, you have some of these things coming up and writing articles on it, and maybe you could tell the listeners how they can enjoy some of these. Sure, just go to footballarchaeology.com and subscribe. All you have to do is submit an email address, and you'll start getting them every week or every time I post one.

Some of the stuff that I do, I, you know, only paid subscribers, you know, get access to it, but a lot of it is available for free. So, that's the best way. You can also follow me on Twitter, on threads, or on the Substack app.

All right, and keep us posted when that book comes out, so we can get the word out and get that in people's hands and enjoy the history of football and some of the aspects you learned about today, and we're going, I'm sure, in better detail in the book. So, Tim, we'd love to have you again next week, and we thank you for joining us today. Very good.

Thanks, Darin

---

We've all been at live football games, we watch them on TV, and we see how the players know sort of when they have to get into the midst of their huddle and call the signals and break huddle and get up to the line of scrimmage and when that little clock starts ticking for the play clock in golden times and what starts that with a certain signal by the referee the ready for play signal and its history are coming up today with footballarchaeology.com's Timothy Brown and we're up with Tim in just a moment.

Together, we'll have a few laughs, talk a little ball, and explore the evolution of the "ready for play" signal, its origins, and how it's become an integral part of the game.

This post is based on Tim's original article titled:The Meaning Behind the Ready-to-Play Signal and Others

We also have a podcast audio version of the discussion found at:
Unveiling the History of the Ready for Play in American Football with Timothy Brown or you can find it on your favorite podcast provider in the Pigskin Dispatch Podcast for July 23, 2024.

-Transcription of the Ready For Play Signal History with Timothy Brown


Hello, my football friends. This is Darin Hayes of pigskindispatch.com. Welcome once again to the Pigpen, your portal to positive football history, and welcome to Tuesday. It's footballarchaeology.com day, and Timothy Brown is bringing us another exciting aspect of football history.

Tim, welcome back to the Pigpen. Hey, Darin. Thank you.

Looking forward to signaling and talking about the ready-to-play signal. Well, actually, it's pretty cool stuff, I think. Yeah, I'm definitely ready to play to hear this and hit play. Have you tell us all about the history of this signal that I'm very familiar with?

Yeah, well, you know, it's one of those where, you know, I think a lot of us non-officials, you know, we tend to think of the official signals as the ones they give for penalties and then obviously scoring opportunities and things like that. But there are other signals that happen on virtually every play of the game that we just kind of don't even think about that very much. This one happens every scrimmage down, but yeah, every kicking down, too.

Yeah, and so it happens all the time, right? And so I forget how I think, you know, I came across an article on this or but so, you know, this is really about the, you know when you go back to the history of football, you know, it came from rugby. And so, you know, back in the day, it was much more of a continuous action game. You know, the game did not stop.

Well, originally, we didn't have downs in football. So, you know, definitely didn't stop. But even after there were downs, you know, I've done a tidbit or a story, at least on, you know, kind of breaking down the 1903 Yale Princeton game film.

And which is really a fun thing to watch and to read if you're interested in the breakdown of it. But one of the things that's really clear from seeing that film is the pace of play. You know, somebody gets tackled, the center gets over the ball, referee never touches the darn thing, center gets over the ball.

And as soon as the quarterback calls the signals, boom, they run the play. So, they're moving, you know, at much more of a rugby sort of pace. You don't have the stupid officials getting in the middle of everything and mucking things up for the players.

All those, the Zebras. I'm plugging my ears as you're saying. Yes, I know.

That's why I'm saying. The Zebras didn't even have stripes in those days. But it was just a very rapid pace of play.

You know, when they played a 45-minute half, they played 45 minutes. So, and even when the ball went out of bounds, originally, you know, the players were the ones that brought the ball back in, either by tossing it in like a line out, they could toss it back, they could plunk it onto the field, or they could walk it in after declaring how far they were going to walk it in. So, so anyway, it was just a different animal.

But then, then the 20s came about. And in the 20s, you had a couple of things going on, you had the Notre Dame box or Notre Dame shift, and the Minnesota shift was, you know, popular. So, you had a bunch of teams doing all these shifts before they snapped the ball, which slowed down the pace of play a little bit, right? Because they'd get in formation, then they'd jump and, you know, moved right or left, whatever they were doing.

Then, the other thing that happened in the 20s was that we had the beginning of consistent huddling. You know, there'd been a couple of people that huddled before that, but really, you know, Zupke in Illinois, they're the ones who really made huddling happen. And so that was, again, a thing that while they typically got the playoff almost as fast as teams that didn't huddle, it still kind of slowed the game down a little bit.

So, so then one of the tactics that came about was as the, as things weren't quite as fast as they had been in the past, and as much as anything, teams were starting to use different formations instead of just always aligning in the, in the traditional tee, they were starting to use, you know, like a single wing that either was to the left or to the right. So, you know, they were taking time to move into different formations. And so one thing, and then the defense would take a little bit of time to react and align themselves to, to whatever the offense was doing.

So one of the things the offense started doing was running quickie plays, where they'd like to get into a formation, boom, snap it faster than, you know, to kind of catch the defense off guard, which became problematic because then sometimes the defense was in, they were defensive, defenseless players in today's terminology. So it became a safety issue. The other thing that was happening is that they would sometimes like send, you know, once, then a little bit later when substitutions became, you know, started freeing up, you'd see teams sending three guys off the field and putting two guys on.

So they were missing a player. Well, sometimes they'd have that missing player standing right on the sideline, kind of hiding himself. Sometimes, that was called lonesome pole cat or lonesome, lonesome end.

But, that was also different, but nevertheless, the concept was that there'd be a guy over there all by himself, and they'd snap the ball, and he'd head downfield. So they'd toss him the P and, you know, hopefully, you know, catch a long touchdown pass. So all that stuff led in 1951 to a rule that said the referee has to spot the ball on every play.

And because, again, previously, it was much more of the center doing that. So, with the referee spotting the ball on every play he had, they developed what they called the ready-to-play signal to indicate to the players that the ball was ready to be snapped, right? And until he gave that signal, it couldn't be snapped. And so what I didn't realize until I got into, you know, doing this research was what that signal meant, right? Because there are a lot of signals that are just kind of meaningless.

They're just some kind of arm motion, but they don't really relate to the penalty themselves. There are other things, like the holding penalty, right? One arm, you know, yeah, they grab the wrist or just below the wrist. So, okay, that means holding, that makes sense.

And at least the old clipping rule, you know, made sense. There's others like that, you know, block in the back, maybe face mask. Yeah.

And so, but the, so the ready to play signal, that, the signal, which is some of the drawings make it look like he's kind of going with a full arm motion, but I think of them mostly as like kind of pulling straight down. You know, they raise their arm and then pull straight down. Maybe you can tell me what is proper.

It's the first one that you said because they call it a term on the field, which is chopping the ball in for play. So you're, it's almost like you have a little hatchet, and you're, you're making a chopping motion. Right.

But the whistle is really the true signal, the referee blowing that whistle, every play and chopping the ball and saying it's ready for play. And it's, and I know because of recent timing rules in between plays, it used to be when the 25-second clock would start. Now, you know, a lot of levels have changed that.

So you have 40 seconds or something in between when the ball was last dead to get the next snap off, but that's when that would use to start to at the ready for play. So it was an important, important part. And it also starts the clock.

If you had a play where you got a first down, you had an official's timeout. So you stopped the clock in high school to reset the chains, the ready for play would start the clock again in motion. Okay.

Well, so part of what I liked about the story was just that, that, that chopping signal was supposed to be at least some of the period articles said that that was supposed to be akin to, you know, the conductor on a train pulling the chain that blew the steam whistle or, you know, factories used to have whistles that, you know, to mark the end of a shift or, you know, lunchtime, whatever it may be. So it was pulling the chain and, yeah. And then even like, you know, I know when my kids were younger, sometimes they'd make that signal to truck drivers to get them to honk their horns as we're driving by because horns on trucks, you know, especially the horns that they have on the roof, you know, used to pull a chain to make them, you know, I think you're technically right.

If you look at the official signals, like when they have them on cards or in the back of books or anything, it is more like you're saying this, but I don't know. There are very few that do that. And it's probably because we're, you know, we're doing that a hundred times in a game.

Your blood rushes out of your hand. You're just having it down more towards your chest and your waist to chop it. The original images all show up as a full chop, an extended arm chop.

Okay. Almost like the Florida state people, right? That kind of emotion.

So, but I didn't know if that had evolved over time or not, but that was for sure the early signals. Okay. Yeah.

I know that's the way I always did. And that's the way, and I did it by observing my peers when I was, before I was a referee, when I was a line judge and headlinesman, I would watch the referee would do that. So, but they always called it chopping the ball.

And you know, it's okay. Yeah. Interesting.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

So, I mean, but part, again, part of the amusement for me is just, and I kind of ended this particular tidbit by saying, okay, so I went through, I think there's 45 or 47 current NCAA signals for the officials and just kind of saying, okay, well, about half of them seem to have an inherent meaning. They kind of match whatever the signal is, right? Or that whatever the infraction is or whatever they're signaling, whereas others, it's like, you know, putting your arms out, you know, there's like, okay, I don't know what that means, but you know, I mean, it's just like any kind of semaphore flags, you know, you're crossing them or waving them, you know, like the guys on aircraft carriers, you know, it's like, okay, well, whatever it was, as long as it means something to somebody.

There you're right. I mean, in it, when you're learning the signals as an official when you're a referee, I mean, that was, it's, that was like the thing that freaked me out when they said, okay, this is your first game, and you're a referee. That was the thing I panicked.

I know the rules. I know what the signals are, but I'm thinking, God, you have that stage fright, you know, everybody's looking at you to signal. And the ones I had problems with is you have the illegal substitution, and you have the signal.

I would get those two mixed up constantly. And I would have to study almost my first, especially that first season. I'm looking at that card every single game.

And before I got there, I'm like, Oh God, I don't want to get, you know, screw this thing up and have the wrong signal. And the PA announcer announced the opposite thing of what I was calling. So it's interesting.

And I love how, you know, the signals match, you know, like face masks, like you said, or horse collar, which is sort of a newer signal that there's no doubt what, what the guy did when you, when you're signaling that holding, you know, you sit there and you think about it very rarely in football. Have I ever called holding because some, uh, some, an opponent grabbed the other opponent's wrist to do it, but you get to just, it's still made, it makes sense? But it's kind of cool that hockey, lacrosse, and sports like that have adopted football officials' signals for holding, and they use the same signals on some of those things.

That's kind of cool. Yeah. Yeah.

Those baseball guys are there. Yeah. They're kind of weird.

Yeah. That's, that's for sure. But Tim, that is fascinating stuff.

I love when, uh, you know, we get into something that happens every day that people maybe just don't really realize it's happening and you bring out that aspect of football and then you take the history of it and how it evolved. That's just such a cool aspect of what you do. And maybe you could share with folks how they could enjoy some of your other work that you've done on some items like this.

Sure. Uh, just basically go to footballarchaeology.com, um, and just subscribe. It's pretty effortless process and you'll, you'll get an email every time that, that, uh, I post a new, new article and then there's different ways to follow me on social media as well.

And then, you know, I'll also just put in a plug. I've got a, a new book coming out called a history of the football that basically just goes back to literally the middle ages and kind of traces how the football has changed shape, size, color, stripes, weight, inflation levels, just kind of all kinds of little dorky little things about the football. But some of them, you know, there's, I think, you know, came across some, found some pretty interesting stuff, interesting stories about how things changed and how, you know, in some cases, some personalities and individuals like George Hallis, you know, had an influence on the ball that we know and love today.

No, right. Sounds like some great stuff. And, uh, we'd love to hear more about it and love to talk to you about some more football history next Tuesday.

Very good. Look forward to it.

---

Today, we're taking you on a journey back in time to the hallowed ground of American football. Imagine a field where the echoes of legendary plays still linger in the air, where the grass has witnessed the birth of gridiron strategies, and where the very soul of the game seems to permeate the soil.

Wesleyan's Andrus Field is the oldest football field in America. Join us as Tim Brown of FootballArchaeology.com visits to delve into the venue's rich history, uncovering the stories of the players, coaches, and fans who have left their mark on this legendary patch of turf. From its humble beginnings to its place in football folklore, we'll explore Andrus Field's captivating legacy.

If you love the football talk on the history and evolution, then you check out the original article Tim wrote America's Oldest Football Field.

We also have a podcast of the episode found at: Where is America's Oldest Football Field.

-Transcription of American Oldest Football Field with Tim Brown

Hello, my football friends, this is Darin Hayes at PigskinDispatch.com. Welcome once again to The Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history, and welcome to another Tuesday, FootballArcheology.com day, where we get to visit with Timothy P. Brown and learn another great antiquity of football. Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen.

Hey, thanks, Darin. Look forward to chatting about old times and old fields. Old times and old fields, a great way to take us into a story that you wrote not too long ago, earlier this year, titled America's oldest football field in one of your tidbits on FootballArcheology.com. What do you have to say about the story? Well, I guess if there's listeners out there who had not read the tidbit, if you were to guess which football field has been in use as a football field for the longest, I would guess maybe one in a thousand would guess the correct answer.

Probably a lot more could guess the right region of the country. It was an eastern team, which would make sense, but probably not too many would guess the school. So the school is Wesleyan, and they play now.

It's a big deal academically, a big deal conference of a bunch of small schools on the East Coast, New England schools, and but they play D3 football and or D3, you know, all their sports. But there was a time, there was a day when Wesleyan and some of their counterparts would, you know, match up and with the biggest teams playing at the time. So, you know, here and there we'll talk about the Intercollegiate Football Association, which was founded in 1876, you know, at that time it was, you know, Penn, Harvard, and Princeton, and Yale attended but didn't join.

And then within a year or two, Wesleyan joined. So Wesleyan was part of that early mix of teams that was in the IFA. And I don't think they ever really competed very well.

You know, they lost consistently to those teams. But then, you know, and they would play like, they played Dartmouth all the time and other schools like Williams and, you know, similar schools to them. But the point really is that in the 1880s and into the 1890s, they were playing with the best teams in the country.

And so, like a lot of places early on, they just, they played where, like in the best open field they could find. And they happen to have one on campus. And apparently it had some ruts.

And, you know, I mean, they, the fields back then just weren't like they are today. They weren't these manicured lawns. But they use the same field for baseball.

You know, I've seen images of them setting up, like temporary, you know, we think of tennis courts as these permanent, you know, these permanent things back then or now. But back then you set up a tennis court wherever there was an open piece of flat land, you know, where there was grass. And so, you know, I've seen pictures of tennis courts set up on this field.

I think I've seen some images from our friends north of the border where they would flood some of their fields and have hockey rinks on the football field in the wintertime. Yeah. I mean, we had one at the park one street up from us, you know, growing up.

I'm not that far north. I'm just, I was pretty far north. Yeah, it's pretty far north where you are.

So, but then in, so they would play games on this field. And then in 1897, one of their alums, the guy from the class of 1862, so he graduates in the middle of the civil war, he donated money to fix up this field and kind of build a stadium, you know, make a stadium out of it. And so, you know, that field opened in 1897.

And Wesleyan has been playing football on that field ever since. Right now, it's gone through different, you know, variations of, you know, stands and scoreboards and whatnot. But, you know, fundamentally, it's the same location that they've played their games at.

Just, you know, another couple of things that kind of interesting that came up in the research, some of which I already knew, but just reminded. So one was that in the late 1880s, in 1888 and 1889, Wesleyan had a faculty member who was on the athletic committee. And he had been the manager of the Princeton football team in his undergrad days.

So he helped coach the Wesleyan team in those years. And that guy's name was Woodrow Wilson, who would later become the President of Princeton, and then the President of the United States. So they were, if you played, you know, if you played for Wesleyan back then, you could later claim that you played football for the President of the United States, which pretty cool.

Yeah, definitely. And then the other thing was just in, and this was actually the 1887 yearbook. It's just kind of a cute thing I find.

They described the positions and the positions pretty much match up the way that we would describe offensive positions now that though they had two halfbacks and a fullback. But the guys between the ends and the guards, they called the left and right tackler, not tackle. So, and, you know, but the funny, the cool thing is that, you know, that's in print, but that's how the tackle position got its name because it was on defense teams used to run the ball at the tackles, you know, just running off tackler right at the tackle.

And so these guys made a lot of tackles. So they were the left and right tackler. So it was just neat to see that in print as the original form of the term.

Yeah. Yeah. That is pretty cool.

Very interesting, especially at the oldest continuous football field. I got a question maybe you can answer. Now, you know, we know it was a grass field back then.

A lot of these stadiums have turned, gone from natural turf to artificial turf. And so is this field still a grass stadium? I don't know. The image or the tidbit has an image of the stadium, you know, a recent year image of the stadium.

So it would show whether it's natural turf or grass, but I don't know offhand. Yeah, it looks pretty green. That's what posed the question to me.

If they had it that green, maybe either they got some great photographers or some nice filters or really good grounds crew. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, I would guess it's probably artificial turf. I mean, it's probably like any other field that's used nowadays where they've got, you know, they're playing lacrosse or playing field hockey on that thing. They're playing soccer.

So I would guess it's probably, you know, artificial, but there's still some really nice football fields out there that are natural turf and they do a nice job of manicuring them and make them look pretty on TV anyway. Well, like in the big tenants, mostly the schools that have like big, um, it's not really agriculture, but like grass science kinds of programs, you know, like the horticulture. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, like Michigan state has, and I believe Purdue might, I'm not, I'm not sure, but Michigan state's got a big program in that stuff. And so, you know, they, they're not, they're not getting rid of there.

Right. And then, you know, I think generally in the South, there's more grass than there is up North. Um, but, you know, nowadays, I mean, even the grass fields are beautifully drained and, you know, the drainage was just coming into play on athletic fields, you know, turn of the century or, you know, that kind of timeframe.

So, and those were only in like the best spots. Yeah. I can tell you for one that spent a lot of time, uh, standing and running on a football field.

I much rather be on, on grass, even on the sloppy days, because it's something about turf fields. And I went from, you know, the astroturf carpets to the field turfs of today. And there's something about it.

You just, your shins and your knees and your ankles just don't, they feel really achy by the time you're, you're done with the game on there compared to a nice giving, you know, earthen fields. Well, and they, uh, especially the old, the original old astroturf, um, those things were hotter than blazes. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, your feet just burned. Yeah.

And it's just, you felt the cement underneath you on those. So yeah, definitely. Well, a great story and a great, uh, a monument to the game of football, you know, having this field that's been, you know, what, 150 years or I'm sorry, you started the 1890s.

I started on that field, 1897. So 130 years, give or take a few years. So just amazing that, uh, doing that on the same place and playing the same game.

Yeah. You know, it's, it's an interesting thing that, you know, I mean, I've talked about this elsewhere, but like for the most part, if the, with the pro teams, if they're getting rid of one stadium, they build a new one in a different location. Colleges, you know, some of that goes on, but the vast majority of it, it's, they redo the existing stadium or they'll tear it even like Northwestern, they're tearing the whole thing down and then they're rebuilding on the same site.

Right. I mean, campuses for the most part is space constrained and that, you know, they want to stay on campus, whatever, but like, you know, even places like, you know, Georgia Tech has a really old stadium. Wisconsin's got a really old stadium, you know, there's others that are, and then, you know, a whole slew of them built in the twenties, pretty much everybody's still playing in those, in those stadiums.

So it's, I don't know, you know, so these guys are maybe they're the ones that establish that template. Yeah. Maybe the, aren't those architecturally appeasing and don't have the technology that some of these brand new stadiums offer, but there's some nostalgia, almost like going to the old baseball stadium, you know, going to Fenway and watching a game compared to, you know, going to some of the newer stadiums.

There's just something about it, the architecture and the feel of the game. And the neighborhood. I mean, even like, you know, all those old places are really cool.

Now. Yeah. I think some of the new places are really cool too, but for different reasons.

Right. Yeah, absolutely. Two different pieces of enthusiasm that come out from the fans from those.

So the nostalgic feel always wins in my heart. Yeah. But your, your butt might be a little bit sore, but you're cricking your neck a little bit and look around poles and things like we talked about in the past, but you definitely get to feel the history in some of those stadiums is kind of cool.

And so, you know, speaking of feeling the history, you, you talk about the history of the game quite often going into some of these nooks and crannies that you know, not a lot of people get an advantage point of, of seeing, but you, you have these a few times a week coming out and maybe you could share with the listeners how they can partake in some of your writings on these. Yeah. Well, so obviously they can subscribe to this podcast and listen here, but you know, if you want to read the tidbits, you know, I release them every couple, every couple of days, more or less.

And so you just go to my I've got a sub stack called football archaeology.com. You just type that in and subscribe and you'll get, you know, get an email every time that I send out a new, a new story. You can also follow me on Twitter on threads or on the sub stack app or obviously just go out there and, you know, bookmark it and go whenever you want. But if you want to make sure you get every story, whether you read it or not, at least you'll know that it came across then subscribing is really the only way to do that.

All right. Well, Tim, we definitely appreciate you joining us here on this Tuesday and every Tuesday as we get to talk to you. We're honored by that and we would love to talk to you again next Tuesday.

Very good. Look forward to it and we'll find something to talk about.

---

Sometimes our fondest memories of playing football are some of the memories that we had on the sidelines with the guys. Others might be on the sidelines with some of the pieces of equipment that we use every day that we probably don't think much about.

This conversation is based on Tim's original Tidbit titled: Football And Paper Cups.

On the go? Also check out our Podcast version

Well, that's one of those stories we have today from football history. Timothy Brown joins us to tell us about another piece of football's antiquity. He's coming up in just a moment.

-Transcription of our Chat with Tim Brown

Hello, my football friends.

This is Darin Hayes of pigskindispatch.com. Welcome once again to the Pigpen, your portal for positive football history. And welcome to another exciting Tuesday as we have Timothy P. Brown of footballarchaeology.com joining us to talk about another aspect of some antiquity of football. Tim, welcome back to the Pigpen.

Hey, Darin. Good to see you and hear your wonderful voice once again. Yeah, I thought about for this segment, taking a string and some Dixie cups and using that to communicate for it.

But I thought maybe that the listeners wouldn't get the, you know, the audio or the video. So yeah, well, and some of them probably aren't old enough to remember using Dixie cups and a piece of string to communicate over distances. That's true.

I can still remember tin cans too. So but yes, that's a side of place. But that was a poor segue into our topic for this segment.

Tim wrote an article back in May titled football and paper cups and, you know, just a little side track of sidebar football, a little sideline information here and always a great piece of football history. So we're excited to hear this. Yeah, so this one, you know, I mean it, I, I'm old enough to remember the days of water discipline.

And while I don't know that it was really severe in my day, you know, you just didn't have total access to water like is the assumption today that there's, whenever anybody wants water, they get it. But for a long time, you know, for a century plus, in football and really just in any kind of sport in the military, water discipline was a big deal. And, you know, there was this attempt to, you know, I think they, at one level, they thought that, you know, drinking water was a sign of weakness.

And also maybe they thought was a bit unhealthy to do it in the middle of exercise, drinking cold water, especially. And, you know, even, you know, if you watch a band of brothers, you know, there's a scene where the captain what's his nuts, you know, has them pour out their canteens and obviously, you know, somebody had broken water discipline, you know, so it was, it was all over. It was, you know, kind of all throughout sports and any, anywhere, any situation where physical fitness was a big issue.

And so, it was terribly misinformed and made worse by the uniforms and equipment of the time. So, you know, at the time, players wore these heavy, especially early on, heavy moleskin or canvas pants. They wore wool jerseys and later cotton jerseys, but all of them, you know, like cotton absorbs like, and moleskin and canvas are cotton products.

They absorb like 23 times their weight in water. So, you know, your pants could get really heavy just from sweat. And then when you, you know, I mean, the reason we have wicking fabrics is because it draws the sweat away from your body and allows your body to sweat.

You know, if it's all in the, in the uniform, you don't sweat properly. And so, you don't cool down properly. So anyways, you know, these guys were in these, you know, heavy leather helmets that didn't, you know, release heat very well either.

And they were often told, don't take your helmets off on the field. All those things contributed to people being, you know, just really suffering from heat trauma. So that really changed.

I mean, I attribute, you know, the biggest change to the University of Florida's Gatorade studies and the studies that developed the Gatorade product in the mid-sixties. And once, once it was shown, or at least once people believed that players who drank Gatorade performed better, especially late in games, then it was like, Hey, okay, tell me no more. You know, I'm, I want my players drinking Gatorade, you know? And, you know, cause it happened that the first year that Florida used Gatorade, they had like four come from behind victories during the season.

So everybody was like, Oh, Gatorade. So, and that really just, I mean, almost overnight things changed in that regard. So people gave access to water.

And so anyways, that's all kind of background to the fact that, you know, around the time that I wrote this article, I came across an image that was, it was a Penn State trainer, guy named, I hope I'm pronouncing his name correctly, Jack Holmy. And he had developed this metal tray that sat on top of the water bucket that you normally, you know, back then everybody took water buckets out onto the field of the ladle. And then, you know, the guys drink from that water bucket, you know, they use the ladle to drink from the water bucket.

Well, oftentimes it would have like a bloody sponge. If they wiped off somebody's face, the sponge went right back in there. So, you know, it was not, it wasn't the days of like blood on the uniform that we have now.

That really hits our modern sensibilities through COVID and everything, you know, where we're washing our hands 90 times a day. Yeah. So, he developed this tray that sat atop the water bucket and that tray then had a bunch of little metal cups.

So, you could scoop water into the metal cup and then each player could drink, you know, individually. So, I thought, okay, well, that's kind of a cool invention, but why didn't he just use paper cups? Which, you know, when you ask a question like that, then you have to say, well, when did they first develop paper cups? And so, you know, that led me down into that rabbit hole. And so, it turns out that the paper cup really was, you know, developed by an attorney who lived in Boston, early part of the 20th century, a guy named Lawrence Llewellyn.

And so, he develops paper cups in 1907. And, you know, they were marketing them having, you know, some success. But in 1916, they changed the company name to Dixie Cups, which, you know, pretty much everybody knows of now.

And one of the other big things that they developed was, you know, I think everybody's had those little ice cream. In the summer, you get ice cream with, you know, paper cup and a lid and a wooden spoon. Wooden pallets, a spoon, I say.

Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

It's like a paddle. Yeah. So, his company developed that product as well.

And the funny thing is that, you know, the paper cup didn't seem to really resonate with the football crowd. But, you know, this lawyer is from Boston and, you know, across the Charles River is Harvard. And Percy Houghton, who was the coach at Harvard at the time, he had paper cups, you know, full of water delivered, you know, taken out onto the field for the players.

So, you know, Houghton was a brilliant guy in at least that way, besides his coaching acumen and, you know, winning multiple national titles. So, then, you know, the paper cup kind of becomes, it's just this thing that doesn't really quite fit. You know, I mean, it's making some progress, but it starts becoming popular in the Coca-Cola.

You went to the, down to the drugstore and went to the fountain and they made a Coca-Cola for you. And if you wanted to leave, you couldn't take the glass cup. So, they charge you a penny to put it in a paper cup to walk out of there.

So, I mean, he just, as a kid, I remember all these Coca-Cola paper cups and, you know, I'm sure they're still around somewhere. But so, you know, paper cups were coming on. And so, but it's still like, I mean, I've looked at, you know, lots and lots of pictures of multi-football and I just don't see paper cups on the field.

So, it's like, okay, what was holding him back? And then, and why even in 46, when this article came out, was he still doing this metal thing? Well, I think the best explanation for that is World War II. There were paper shortages, you know, and one of the last things you were going to do is use paper cups on a football field. So, they kept using the water bucket and ladle.

And then, so pretty much, you know, shortly after the war, then as paper became more available, then paper cups on the sideline became more popular and the same tray or concept of the tray could be used for paper cups. Though, you know, who knows? You know, who knows if, you know, I'm sure there were people using ladles for quite a while afterwards. But again, it's just one of those, this is just one of those goofy little stories of, you know, football using a technology that was available and had been available for 50 years before football, you know, adopted it.

You know, so it's just one of those kind of slow things that somebody finally realizes, you know, if we give them, you know, if we give them the water in paper cups, it's it's more hygienic, it's, you know, whatever. Yeah, you know, so anyway, it's just a goofy little story, but, you know, I had fun kind of researching it and then writing it. No, you had some great things, great story.

A couple of thoughts come to my mind. First of all, you're telling the story of, you know, the attorney and the paper cup and then renaming the company Dixie. It almost reminded me of like watching a history channel, Modern Marvels.

Somebody comes up with an idea and then, well, now it's Federal Express or whatever they're talking about. That was pretty cool. The other thing, you know, when you're talking about Gatorade and coming out in the 60s, do you, I know I've either read about it or heard about it where teams used to drink pickle juice to get the electrolytes.

Did you ever hear stories of that? You know, I don't remember that, you know, specifically, but, you know, I mean, even like when I was in high school and early college, I think, you know, we were still taking salt tablets, which is not a good idea, but, you know, we did it because that's what we were told to do. Right. So, I mean, that was the way and I don't really know what was all in those salt tablets, but, you know, they always had bottles of them sitting around.

And so, you know, and I mean, you know, Gatorade replenishes some of the same things that are in salt tablets, but does so in different dosages. And there's lots of other, you know, I mean, one of the things that when the scientists said, you know, there are medical college people in Florida who were doing the research to develop Gatorade. And a lot of what, you know, what they were doing initially was they were trying to find ways to figure out what was in the sweat.

You know, so they collect sweat off of football players. They'd wring out their clothing and, you know, just to figure out, well, what is it that needs to be replenished? Right. And so, you know, they dig it around with it to figure out what was in there, but also what was palatable.

You know, somebody be willing to drink. How'd you like to be the lab assistant on that? You know, Hey, I take that sweaty shirt and wring it out and tell me what's in it. Well, I think there's some other assignments that are worse than that.

The other comment that came out now, I, it seems like it's a more recent, like last 20 years, but the, the paper cups are like sort of cone shape. Like you used to get snow cones in. I don't remember seeing those when I was a kid, you know, but was that the shape that the cups were when they first came out the paper cups or do you know what shape they were? Yeah.

I don't know. I was just assuming that they had a flat bottom, but yeah, it could be cylinder or the conical. The conical ones are just, they're kind of brilliant because they're so utilitarian and probably much easier to manufacture and probably use less paper and, you know, the whole process, but it's so simple.

It's, I don't know, just, I don't know what you think about it. Cause I had to use a bunch of those. I was on a cruise recently and that's what they had for us when we came to shore.

So it's those paper cups. Well, very cool story, Tim, you know, that's a, you know, a great piece of football history that you don't hear anywhere else. So you don't, you know, most of us don't think about that stuff, but these guys had to drink water and it was a brilliant idea with the paper cups, a brilliant idea with the gentleman from Penn state with the metal attachment to the bucket.

So you don't have the bloody towels going in there in your drinking water, but you have a lot of different little unique stories and aspects of football that you research and you do a great job on. And how can people enjoy some of those on a more regular basis? Yeah. So, I mean, the easiest thing is just to go to footballarchaeology.com, subscribe, and you'll get an email every time I release an article, you'll get an email into your inbox.

You can also follow me on Twitter because I post each one of those as well. And then threads, or, you know, you just go out to the, you can follow me on the Substack platform as well, but, or just go out to the site whenever it suits your fancy and use the search function and try to find articles that you're, where you've got some curiosity. Well, we certainly enjoy it and we enjoy having you here on Tuesday and we thank you again for joining us.

Love to have you again next week to talk about another piece of football's antiquity and love to hear some more. I will do my best to be here. All right.

Thanks. Have a good one.

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Discover how the grand opening of Harvard Stadium revolutionized the game of football. This video explores the stadium's groundbreaking design, its impact on player safety, and how it set the stage for modern football stadiums. From its early days as a pioneering venue to its enduring legacy, we delve into the story of how Harvard Stadium shaped the future of the sport. Featuring historical footage, expert analysis, and interviews, this video is a must-watch for football fans and history enthusiasts alike.

Do you love the football talk on history and evolution? Then wait till you check out the original article Tim wrote Building and Opening Harvard Stadium.

Also check out the podcast version of our chat at Harvard Stadium Pigskin Dispatch Podcast.

-Transcription of When Harvard Stadium Opened with Tim Brown

Hello, my football friends; this is Darin Hayes at PigskinDispatch.com. Welcome again to The Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history. And it is Tuesday.

As we have traditionally done over the last couple of years, we have visited with Timothy P. Brown of FootballArcheology.com, talking about another aspect of great football history that maybe isn't mainstream and we don't know much about. Tim has done some digging and studying on it, and he's got a great one for us tonight. Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen.

Thanks, Darren. Yeah, looking forward to talking about cementing our relationship. If I can really pull in a really bad bet.

Yeah, I think that might earn some cement shoes there on that one. That's... I don't prepare these. He's just, you know, they just come right out, you know, and sometimes it doesn't come off right.

Tim is segwaying into a tidbit that he wrote a little about a year ago, a little over a year ago, or maybe it was this year, June 26. Building and opening Harvard Stadium, which is, you know, a great iconic stadium of college football that, you know, the cathedral, I guess, of football. So maybe, Tim, we'd love to hear about the history of what you have on this one.

Yeah, so Harvard Stadium, you know, I'm happy to report that I did see one game there. I went and saw Harvard Yale there 20 years ago or so. And it was; I've only had obstructed viewing seats on two or three occasions, and that was one of them.

There's, atop the stadium, there's these big cement pillars. And my seat was directly behind one of those. So I paid the full ticket price.

But anyways. Yeah, so it gives me visions of the old Cleveland Municipal Stadium where the Browns used to play, the old Browns. And the same way you get up on those upper levels, you have these giant pillars in the way, just half the field.

Well, yeah, that's I mean, I've done the I-beam thing at the Old County Stadium and Tiger Stadium, but. This was a much, this was much bigger than an I-beam. So anyways, but, you know, that Harvard Stadium was built in 1903.

Prior to that, they played basically right next door to where they built Harvard Stadium. It's, you know, it was an open area across the Charles River from from the rest of campus. That's over near where the Harvard Business School is.

But the. So. You know, the money, you know, they had all this money to build this new stadium, and they decided to build it out of reinforced concrete, which at the time was just this.

You know, exciting new way to build, you know, major structures. But this was the first, you know, sizable structure in the world to be built of reinforced concrete. So, the Romans had figured out how to do concrete.

And then we'd forgotten the magical, you know, of that for, you know, almost whatever, eighteen, nineteen hundred years. So, but, you know, they kind of got that going again. And so.

They had the money and they basically said, OK, we're going to build the start building this thing. After the baseball season is over, because they were building it atop the old baseball field. So they couldn't couldn't start building until like.

I was like, you know, half midway through June or something like that. And then it was just like Katie barred the door. You know, I mean, they literally had 800 workmen there every day trying to build this thing.

And they didn't have to dig it out or anything. They didn't. You know, it was basically just that they poured these big concrete slabs.

You know, just it's kind of like an assembly line production built one slab after another. And it was all with, you know, they it was all built with like sack creep. So, you know, they figured they had like 90,000 bags of cement.

Wow. These people poured. And so, you know, but, you know, the stadiums didn't have all the amenities that they have now.

So there were no bathrooms. There were no there were no concessions. That there were no lights.

You know, there's no maybe they had telephones in there. But I mean, literally, I mean, it was about as fair as you could have it by today's standards. You know, at the time, it's just this incredible structure.

So, I mean, they ended up it literally was being the progress of building the stadium was reported around the world, you know, among construction aficionados. Right. But so they, you know.

As we talked last week, you know, Yale would play almost all their games at home. Harvard was in the same situation. Everybody would come to Harvard because, you know, even before they built Harvard Stadium, they had a fairly sizable stadium.

They could make more money by playing there than playing at home. So so they played eight home games in the old stadium and in the tid, you know, in the tidbit itself. I've got a cool image from the newspaper showing them playing a game.

I think it's a game that they played against Carlisle. And then in the background, you can see, you know, the stadium is rising, you know, in the background. One other just quick little side note is that, and this is in the tidbit, too, there was in it when I found this article or one of the articles adjoining that article was a newspaper article about this guy in Britain named C.S. Rolls, and he had set a new world record by driving eighty-four miles an hour over the course of a kilometer.

So eighty four miles an hour was the fast, basically the fast anybody had ever driven a car. So I just thought it was interesting that that was next, you know, next door or next to this article. Then, this guy named Rolls joined up with Royce the next year.

They started a car company that most of us are familiar with and fits well with the Harvard thing, right? So anyway, they're building this thing, but they just couldn't get it completed. It is time for the last two games of the season. They wanted it to be ready for the Yale game, which was being played at Harvard that year.

So they stopped construction and then focused for about a week or two just on like cleaning the place up. They built temporary stands. They built like areas to block off the things that were still under construction.

And they had like 90,000 concrete paper bags laying around. They had to clean up. Well, it created a hell of a bonfire.

That's right. And so they did all that stuff, you know, they get it all set up. So then they play.

They wanted to I think they wanted to give it a, you know, a test run playing Dartmouth before, you know, Yale the following week. So Dartmouth comes into play and typically Harvard beat him every year. But that year, Dartmouth had a pretty good team and they end up winning 15 to nothing.

So, you know, the Harvard people are kind of peeled. Thankfully, Yale lost the same week. And so both teams were coming into the game, you know, with their most recent game being a loss.

And but everybody's excited. You know, there's you know, this is going to be the largest crowd to ever see a game at an on-campus stadium. You know, I mean, there were bigger games played at the polo or bigger crowds and polo grounds and, you know, a couple of places here and there.

But on campus, this is like they were going to have about 23 or 25,000 because the stadium wasn't complete. But sure enough, Yale comes in and beats Harvard 16 to nothing. So, you know, so they didn't score in their last in their first two games in Harvard Stadium.

They didn't even score. And they had to wait till the start of the 1904 season before they could win a game in their brand new, massive, reinforced concrete stadium. So anyway, that's kind of just the story.

But it's still, you know, kind of a cute, cute deal. And, you know, it's just. You just realize the things that we just take for granted in terms of the quality of stadiums and the the size of stadium, you know, 33,000 was what they designed this for.

And, you know, at that time, it was a U-shaped stadium. It is now again. But, you know, it was like it was considered just a palace compared to most places.

Right. Yeah. It's not a big fire hazard.

Some of the other ones were worried about collapsing as much as some of the things that were happening at that time at many games around the world. Yeah. So I mean, just the irony that they, you know, they have all this momentum and all this hype of this new stadium and then going, oh, and two and can't even score a point in their games against two rivals.

That's kind of ironic. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, you know, there's other stuff, too, that I think I'm not 100 percent sure about, but I believe that when they built that stadium, they did not plan for it. They didn't plan for like wooden benches. It was just that everybody was going to sit on concrete.

Eventually, they put concrete or wood boards there. But I'm pretty sure the original intention was to sit on concrete, which is fine in September and maybe October or November. Not so much.

Yeah. Now, when did the Yale Bowl that came a few years after the Harvard Stadium? Yeah, that opened in 14. OK.

It's almost 11 years. I mean, Yale, Yale had a, you know, Yale Field, which preceded Yale, the Yale Bowl was a pretty good sized stadium. I mean, I don't know exactly, but I'm guessing it was like 20.

Twenty thousand or something like that, and it increased in size over the years. But, you know, they build those stadiums and all of these, and it would go on; it went on for another 20 years. A lot of times, they'd have like if they were playing like Wesleyan or Bowdoin or something like that.

They'd get 6000 people. But so they really built the stadiums. To handle the Harvard and Yale games and to a lesser extent, Princeton, once every 24 months in the Harvard Yale game.

Well, but, you know, there were everybody. Wanted tickets, and like when they opened it in 03, because of the reduced capacity, they couldn't handle all, you know, all the some people got rejected. Right.

And so, you know, if you're a Harvard guy and you want tickets to the game and you get rejected, that's not a good thing. Yeah, probably not. Your social circles.

You have to get your Rolls-Royce and head back to Boston. Tim, that is an incredible story in so many facets. I'm still trying to absorb all this, so, you know, the whole thing with the Harvard team, the stadium, the Rolls-Royce.

You know, that's just tremendous stuff. You know, you have a lot of things going on there, and it is very historic. And you have a lot of different items like this.

So you come up in your tidbits that you're doing multiple times every week. And maybe you could share with the listeners how they, too, can partake in some of what you're writing is. Yeah, excuse me.

Yeah, just easiest thing is just go to footballarchaeology.com and subscribe. And, you know, you'll get an email every time that I send out a new a new post, which, you know, like you said, a couple of times a week. Other than that, you can follow me on on the Substack app.

That's probably the next best thing. But, you know, if you want to if you want to make sure you get it, you know, subscribe, get the email. And even if you don't read it, you can just delete it.

But it's up to you. Consume as you must. Well, we always enjoy reading from the hardworking historian of the gridiron up there, footballarchaeology.com. We always enjoy that and enjoy the stories.

And we love having you on here each and every Tuesday. And we'd like to talk to you again next Tuesday. Very good.

Again, look forward to chatting next week.