The Unbelievable Story of Left-Handed Quarterbacks

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Footballs seem like they are suited for almost any player to use, and they currently are. That was not always the case, though. There was a time when footballs were indeed designed with handedness in mind. In this post, we'll delve into the history of handed footballs, explore the reasons behind their creation, and discuss why they eventually fell out of favor in professional football.

Timothy P. Brown of Football Archaeology visits us in this episode to share the story of the righty and southpaw editions of the pigskin.

If you love the football talk on history and evolution, then you should check out the original article Tim wrote : Right- and Left-Handed Footballs.

Transcript of Conversation of Right and Left Handed Footballs

Hello, my football friends. This is Darin Hayes of Pigskindispatch.com. Welcome once again to the Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history. it is Tuesday, and Everybody who follows us knows What happens on Tuesday. We have our friend Timothy P Brown of football archaeology calm Join us for another glimpse back in football history and learning something great Tim.

Welcome back to the pig pen. Hey there, good to be with you this evening. I look forward to chatting a little bit about football and Stuff like that. Yeah, you are very Festive between your background and the hat. Is that the Chicago Cardinals or Chicago Marines? I mean, that is correct. So this is the background from 1905, 1905, or 1906. I think it's 1905 Spalding's. You know, their official football guide, And so at least for our purpose today, I'm gonna say it's from the 1905 book, and Yes, since they have the all-American team for 1904.

It looks like, Yeah, So it's got to be that that's pretty and who was National Champions in 1905, in 1905, Michigan Chicago Maroons? Oh, were they okay? Cuz you gave it away to me, and I didn't even get me over the head with a bat, They beat Michigan in the last game of the season On a play that would no longer count the next year because, you know, they changed some rules But they won two to nothing So do nothing. Okay, I think we talked about that game in one of our episodes, and I think we did it.

We did a store or we did a Podcast on it, and I've also, You know, here and there, like on Twitter or something, somebody will say, you know, If you could go back in time and watch one game, what would it be for me? That would be the game. Yeah, Just think about the coaches from that game, Amos Alonzo Stag and Fielding Yost on Michigan's sideline. Oh, yeah. What's his name? You know, his longtime coach at Carnegie, Stephen Walter Stephan? You had Hugo Bezdek, And that's just the Chicago guys, you know, they're up, you know, right? Yeah, Great, great story.

We'll have to rekindle that link for that Podcast episode again so people can enjoy it. That's a good one to listen to, but tonight we have a topic That you wrote on a recent tidbit, and it's called right and left-handed footballs, which sort of caught me by surprise. I remember when I read it back in February when you put it on like, Wow, left-handed football; so it would never have thought so once you tell us a little bit about that tonight. Yeah, so, you know, it's Kind of a, I think it's a fun story just because, you know, When we think about balls being handed, you know, left I mean baseball gloves, There's left hand and right-handed and you know, or any kind of glove basically, I guess You know, but balls Especially round balls. There's tends to be you know You can throw it pick it up or whatever with your right or left hand Bowling balls are the only ones that I really can think of that aren't You know because you gotta stick your thumb in there and fingers and whatnot, so those are left and right-handed I believe but They're drilled right to the individual so yeah so so anyways, and then you know footballs obviously aren't round but You know, so we tend to think of them as universal anyways, right and for the most part that has been the case, but when When they started using footballs in the evening They started painting the balls that that's you know early 1900s as far as I know stag in Chicago actually were the first people That I've got documented, you know documentation that they they painted a ball white Because they had late classes and so they couldn't practice until it was dusk and yada yada So so they start painting balls and then other people picked up on that And you know generally the paint on the ball was Slipperier than Just the tanned leather so that was always a bit of a problem and But you know, they're just worth other than practice and then the really pretty occasional night games People didn't really need to use Painted balls but as as lighting got better and in the 30s in particular is really when lighting Kind of took off right and So, you know high schools were playing under the lights and a lot of colleges, you know added lighting And I think I think that I don't really have You know documented Evidence of this, but I believe that that was so for sure That's when striping came on to the on the balls. Now.

I think the primary reason for that was because If you striped the ball at the end, it wasn't a slippery as a fully painted ball So and they also there was also this whole issue of you know, what I call the camouflaging effect so that You know a lot of teams were still wearing the brown Friction strips or ovals on their jerseys and so a brown ball against the brown Patch could be Kind of hidden People were there teams are starting to wear white jerseys then Stanford was one of them and you know, there were others but so then a white painted ball against the white jersey, you know was problematic so anyways, they started striping them and again, I think it's both the slipperiness and then the So it's a functionality reason and then this camouflaging effect And so, you know, so it's just one of those things where like we know where the stripes go on the ball Right, right Everybody knows it's like two inches to two and a quarter inches in from the tip of the ball and yada You know, I mean, it's a set place and So, you know, we're used to that because that's the only thing we've ever known and yet if you go back and look at the balls of the 30s and into the 50s Originally a lot of the stripes were closer to the laces They had double striping And the you know striping in a couple different patterns they had stripes one or two manufacturers put out balls striped longitudinally rather than You know Latitudinally So anyways, it's just one of those things where you know, it's just Kind of a fun thing where You know, how did they figure this out? And so eventually, but by, you know, the early 1950s, guys like Otto Graham were complaining that the stripe on the ball just happened to hit exactly where he put his thumb. When he, you know, put his hand on the ball, and so, you know, he would complain about it, and then people like John Brody a little bit later. He'd scrape Scrape the paint off the balls that he was gonna use because that was still when teams supplied their own balls, and you know things like that, so eventually, You know, there were enough complaints about this at what the NFL did in around You know in the late 60s the NFL eliminated the stripe on the Underside of the ball. So, you know, each ball traditionally has four panels.

So on the panel Where the quarterbacks where a right-handed quarterbacks thumb would go, They got rid of the stripe on, you know on Well, it's on two different panels because it can hold the ball this way or that way, right, you know and so So if you look at balls from that era, there's a missing stripe on On two of the different two of the panels only have one stripe rather than two And you know two bottoms two bottom panels So then what you know, so Everybody is happy with that and then these two nimrods one called Kenny Stabler and the other Named Bobby Douglas who played for the Bears. They were left-handed, so they showed up. They're like, hey, you know these balls make sense for right-handed quarterbacks. What about us, right? Give me a little bit of love, and so, you know, Davis of Oakland complained about it, and then, in the preseason of 1970, the NFL provided left-handed balls in addition to right-hand balls. So then as an official, the official had to be, You know, They would mark the balls, and I think they just use like a magic marker and they put R or L on the balls To designate that it's a right or left-handed ball and depending on which quarterback was in the game that's the ball that they used and So, I mean, it's just you know, just added to the work that the officials had to deal with They had to inspect more balls, you know all that Kind of Stuff, right? And then somebody finally had the idea. You know, the NFL continued with their right and left-handed balls until 1976, at which point they dropped stripes, right? So before that, they'd use a stripe for night games, but the plain ball for day games, so then in 1975, the NFL or the NCAA Adopted the They adopted the ball that had no striping on the bottom panels Right.

So that's the way it is today if you look at an NCAA ball or stripes on the top two panels, the ones that had joined the laces, But there's no striping on the bottom panels, and this the CFL, on the other hand, They have stripes to go that encircle the ball so So I've always Kind of made the little joke that you know Apparently even though the CFL primarily has Canadian or has American quarterbacks in that league They somehow managed to throw spirals in Canada with a fully striped ball That American quarterbacks can't do when they're in America. So, you know, it's one of those things. I think a lot of times that's stuff. There's as much branding as anything else. You know, it's like CFL wants to have a distinctive ball, and That's one way to do it.

But you know, I don't know. I just think it's Kind of a funny little story. It definitely is the one thing that sort of made me think and I had to keep looking over It's like I have a high school ball.

That's Got the half stripes like you're talking about on the top two panels of the panels that touch the strings, And I'm sitting there thinking, okay, if the big thing was with the Brody and autogram of their thumb resting on it, Why would they put the stripes on that side of the ball? You would think their thumb would be Touching because their fingers would be on the strings, or their thumb would be on one of those two panels, right-handed or left-handed. You would think it almost makes more sense If that was the case; the stripes would be on the bottom two panels that aren't touching. The thumbs gonna rest on the bottom panels on the bottom panels so here is an arena football that one of my sons grabbed at some point. Most Davis to sign it, but So no striping, but if my hand, It's gonna be tough with the way this thing is working. But basically, you know your stripe or your fingers. Okay, so you're I got Okay, and then my thumb is down here on the bottom panel, okay I see I understand that, and if I'm a lefty, so my thumb is on this hand because I'm a righty Lefty, my thumb is on this panel over here.

It does go on the bottom panel. Okay, I'm sorry. You know, I have recently released the history of football in the book. I have images that I got from the Heritage Not Heritage Foundation, but you know, heritage auctions. They had sold a right-handed football, and they sold an NFL right-handed football. That sold a while back, and they gave me permission to, you know, to use those images in the book. Oh, nice. Yeah, So We'll come back to that in a second here, But I have another question. As I was thinking here now, a few weeks ago, You talked about how we had the helmet trickeration episode where that sort of spawned The markings on the helmet so that it would not look like a ball, and you know, you're so we're the stripes on the ball about the same time as the putting Decor on the helmets to make it so they didn't look good.

Yeah, so just to clarify, that helmet trickeration Story that we talked about was from like 1905 Now, and the striping on the helmets didn't kick in until, I Want to say like, 35 or something like that Anyways, you know, it was I think it was in the 30s, but it was for the same reason you know it was because people were There's a running back who would take throw his helmet his brown leather helmet off and to simulate a fumble As far so the first story that I first documentation I found of anybody adding stripes to a ball came in a BYU versus it would be Northern Colorado now and they had a game where one of the teams I think was BYU's wearing white shirts jerseys and Northern Colorado was gonna wear had brown pants that more or less matched the color of the ball, and so they Kind of got into a little bit of a peeing match on that and The the only way they could settle it was to put stripes on the ball So and maybe somebody else's done did it before that but that's the first story. I came across evidence of that happening. So Yeah, so it's it was Kind of. I'm gonna say 33 or something in that Kind of range. So, right in the same middle that decade, then for both interesting.

Okay. Yeah, and then it became, you know, So it's funny, you know, there's some inventions like that that the the manufacturers don't really pick up for a while. But that was one where pretty quickly there were balls available From the manufacturers that were striped or painted and painted and stripped because the white ones would have black stripes The brown ones would have white stripes. There were orange balls with black stripes, Yellow, you know, and ironically enough.

That's your favorite decade when they had the Uglies uniforms, According to some of your writings. Yes Yeah, so there was a lot of eye candy in the mid-30s for football Unf.ortunately, there aren't as many color photos from that period That I can use as Evidence, but some of them, even the black and white it, 's pretty clear how ugly they are Maybe some of those new modern AI apps that color in you know, your old family photos are in black and white and everything and they look pretty good So maybe some of that will help us to augment the history here Played around with some of those things and I'm still trying to figure out exactly what I want to be able to show using AI Images, I thought I thought earlier when you were going reaching back for the football. I saw a box of 64 Crayola's back there. So maybe, oh Wait, we can't. We can't see anything back there.

We just see you disappear into your back. Hey, I wanted to get you thinking a little bit, but Tim, you alluded to it a little bit that you have a book out Yeah on this very subject, and once you tell us a little bit about the book Yeah, you know, it's just so I'll just be real quick. But you know what I found is, You know, I've now got, you know, Coming up on a thousand articles on my football archaeology site, And I had two or three books that I published earlier on football. And so, you know, I've got there's Kind of information scattered all over the place I wanted to so I'm starting a series of books to Kind of condense or consolidate information on Specific topics and so the first one that I did was on the history of the football. So it just looks at Like where did the ball come from? How did it get its shape? Why why is it shaped? Why does have this? prolate spheroid shape You know, why is it constructed the way it's constructed? How did it change over time? Why did it change over time? You know, what were some of the influences when did it get smaller thinner? Etc.

And so, you know as a transition from rugby to football so anyways, just Kind of tells the story of all of those changes and You know, it's just a fun, you know, I think it's fun little read that Kind of just goes into as far as I know It's the first book that looks at you know, the history of the football and maybe that should tell me something But I you know, I think it was Kind of a fun topic No, no, it's definitely a fun topic and I appreciate you. You're letting me have have an advanced copy to read it and it's a great read folks and Definitely want to get a copy of that and Tim as long as we're plugging it. How can people get their hands on the book? Yeah, it's available on on Amazon and I don't know if it will be immediately available through like Walmart and Barnes & Noble, but I'll just tell you I make the most money if you buy it from Amazon I'll make as much money if you buy it from the other sources, but you know, if that's what you need to do Have at it, but it's it's available In you know paperback.

It's 135 pages. So, you know pretty quick read So it's available in paperback Kindle so, you know ebook it's now available on audio So if you prefer to consume in the car, it's not my beautiful voice. It's some, you know artificial voice But it sounds pretty good.

And then And if you you know, if you have Kindle Unlimited, you've got that subscription in the books free so My second favorite f-word free Yeah Kind of like, you know, it's like Spotify the artists still get paid if you listen to your music on Spotify, but just not as much As if you buy it straight up, yeah, well

Tim we appreciate it Of course folks you can visit Tim on his website footballarchaeology.com Check out his tidbits like the one that we talked about tonight and more that he has a thousand articles Like he said so

Tim we thank you for joining us and we will talk to you again next Tuesday.

Very good. Thanks, sir