Timothy P. Brown's Blog, page 23

Factoid Feast XI

As discussed in Factoid Feasts I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, and X, my searches through football history sometimes lead to topics too important to ignore but too minor to Tidbit. Such nuggets are factoids, three of which are shared today.

1909 Sewanee Football

Earlier this week, I published a story about Sewanee: The University of the South and their decision to drop out of the SEC in 1941. While researching that article, I found information about Sewanee's 1909 team putting five players o...

Wilson Football Jerseys of 1964

Wilson Sporting Goods began in 1914, intending to profit from selling the byproducts of slaughterhouses. They mostly sold strings for tennis racquets and violins, surgical sutures, and baseball shoes. In 1915, they acquired a knitting mill to produce athletic uniforms. My earliest Wilson catalog is from 1928, when their jerseys were adorned with friction strips or vertical stripes similar to those officials were beginning to wear.

Jump ahead a half-century from the founding to their 50th-annivers...

Stadium Size, Football Droppers, and Deemphasizers: Sewanee

Before researching the football past of most schools in this series, I knew few details about them unless I had crossed paths with the school at some point. I knew more about a few because they were prominent in earlier times, but most schools that dropped football were never prominent independents or members of significant conferences. Only a few have that tradition, and Sewanee is one of them.

Sewanee: The University of the South is the first Southern team covered in this series, and there is o...

The First Indiana-Notre Dame Game

It is fair to assume that the Indiana-Notre Dame game, the first game of the new 12-team football playoff, will receive a fair bit of coverage. The same was not true of the initial meeting between the schools. Indiana came a’visiting on November 5, 1898, to play on Notre Dame's Bronson Hall Field.

Neither team was a football power then, though Notre Dame had upgraded its schedule under Frank Hering, the subject of yesterday's story.

Hering played two years at Chicago, coached Bucknell for one year...

Pigskin Dispatch Podcast... Why We Paint Football Helmets

Pigskin Dispatch podcaster Darin Hayes and I discuss a factoid about Iowa’s 1925 helmets, painted black and gold and considered “psychologically perfect.” The discussion then gets into the original reason why teams painted their helmets. Listen to learn why.

Iowa’s Herky mascot appears to have distinct helmet coloring, while their 1925 captain does not. (1927 Iowa yearbook)

Watch or listen to the podcast here and/or read the original Tidbit.

It’s never too early to start your holiday shopping or g...

Frank Hering, The Overhand Spiral, and Mother's Day

Frank Hering played football for the University of Chicago in 1893 and 1894, the second and third years of the school and team's existence. He was positioned deep on defense as the team's quarterback, so he was often there to catch and return punts. On some punt returns, he employed a trick, as Stagg recalled 60 years later.

According to Stagg, Hering had developed the ability to throw the overhand spiral pass. On some punt returns, Hering fielded the ball, turned, and threw it to a teammate acro...

Today's Tidbit... The Paul Withington Story

You should have heard of Paul Withington, but his fame as a sportsman and patriot did not continue after his death nearly sixty years ago. Still, he played an interesting role in football, athletics in general, and world events during his day.

Born in California but raised in Hawaii, he attended Harvard, where he played for the Crimson's undefeated 1908 and one-loss 1909 teams, earning second-team All-American honors at center as a senior. He was among the first centers to move off the ball on de...

The 1883 Michigan-Wesleyan Game

Michigan's 1883 team was the only non-Eastern team playing football at their level. This series uses period publications to cover Michigan’s trip east to play Wesleyan, Harvard, Yale, and the Stevens Institute in nine days.

Previous posts in the series: Intro

Michigan had unspecified travel problems on the way from Ann Arbor to Hartford, where it was to play Wesleyan in the first game of the trip. They arrived at 2:20 in the afternoon on November 19, just in time for the game that started at 3:35....

Pitt's Role in Player Numbering and Other Numbering Plans

This week's episode of the Pigskin Dispatch Podcast concerned a portion of an October 2023 Factoid Feast that covered a suggestion to number football players 1 through 11. When preparing for the podcast, I did more research and came across new-to-me information about the University of Pittsburgh’s role in player numbering and alternative approaches to the player numbering system that became the standard.

Below are previous stories about the origins of player numbering and wacky numbering systems...

Today's Tidbit... Football's Lines of Scrimmage

We often hear about players being offside and violating the line of scrimmage, but many football fans do not realize that American football has two lines of scrimmage or how and when the lines of scrimmage came about. Of course, we'll cover both issues here.

America's first football rules arrived in 1876 when the Intercollegiate Football Association adopted a slightly modified version of the Rugby Union rules. Among the modifications were swapping the term scrimmage for scrummage, as occurred wit...