Timothy P. Brown's Blog, page 73

Today's Tidbit... Two-Tone and Split Jersey Numbers

It may be surprising to feature Cal Tech two days in a row, but they deserve the recognition for exploring player equipment possibilities unlike anyone else. The eyeglass shields discussed in yesterday's story offered a vision of football's future, even if no one else paid attention.

Cal Tech, originally called Throop Polytechnic Institute, played intercollegiate football from 1893 to 1968. They were never a football power, yet for most of their playing days, their home field was the Rose Bowl or...

Today's Tidbit... Cal Tech's Eyeglass Shield

I'm a sucker for oddball pieces of player equipment that one person or another developed along the way, and the more quickly the equipment died out, the better. Facial and eye protection is among football's richest veins for oddball equipment. The nose guards of the 1890s and 1910s led to executioner's masks in the 1920s, and birdcage face masks in the 1930s, and a proliferation of Lucite and rubber-covered metal masks in the 1950s.

Some facial protection protected the eyes or allowed players to ...

Today's Tidbit... 1966 Football Practice Equipment Catalog

Football teams practice four, five, or more times more often than they play games, so the methods and equipment used in practice are vital parts of the game's history. Today we review an eight-page catalog released by Premier Products in 1966 that touts their blocking sleds, dummies, and a few miscellaneous items.

Besides the period aesthetic, the catalog cover shows seven players enjoying themselves pushing the sled past the 50-yard line. I don’t know about you, but I never pushed a sled on an a...

Pigskin Dispatch Podcast: Winged Helmet Variations

Pigskin Dispatch podcaster Darin Hayes and I discussed a recent TidBit about the origins of winged leather helmets. Although almost every team that uses the winged-helmet look today uses a particular wing design, there were many winged variations back in the 1930s and 1940s.

Click here to listen, or subscribe to Pigskin Dispatch wherever you get your podcasts.

Here’s the original Tidbit:

Subscribe for free and never miss a story. Support this site with a paid subscription, buy me a coffee (or two),...

Today's Tidbits... Opponents Versus Visitors

Words matter, and our choice of words to describe others goes a long way to communicating what we think of them. For example, consider the minor controversy after Harvard Stadium's opening. The stadium scoreboards were more advanced than most. One sat atop the stands at the closed end of the stadium, and the other stood behind the goal posts at the stadium's open end.

Harvard Stadium (RPPC, Personal collection)

Like all good scoreboards, Harvard's showed the number of points earned by Harvard and ...

Today's Tidbit... The Jump Pass

The legend says that Bronco Nagurski threw the first jump pass in the 1932 NFL Championship game when he had the ball in his backfield, began running forward, and suddenly jumped straight up and threw the ball to a teammate a bit downfield. The Bears' opponents, the Portsmouth Spartans, protested the play, arguing that Nagurski had thrown the pass from within five yards of the line of scrimmage, which was illegal then.

The NFL changed its rule in 1933, allowing passing from anywhere behind the li...

Today's Tidbit... American Football at London's Crystal Palace in 1910

American football's popularity continues to grow internationally. Leagues comprised of natives and American ex-pats exist in many countries. We also have NFL and college games played in the U.K. and Ireland that are like football's destination weddings; most prefer they just stay home, but some tag along to make a vacation of attending.

American football exists due to our playing Canadians in rugby, and we've continued playing cross-border games despite different rules developing in each country....

Today's Tidbit… 1876 IFA Rule #34: Right Angle Throw Out

This is #34 in a series covering football's original 61 rules adopted by the Intercollegiate Football Association in 1876. We review one rule each Friday.

While the image is from an 1896 book on rugby, it illustrates the fair or lineout used under the IFA rules of 1876. (Robinson, B. Fletcher, Rugby Football, London: A. D. Innes, 1896.)

Rule 32 listed the five methods of bringing the ball back onto the field of play after it went into touch. The third method allowed the team that possessed the bal...

Today's Tidbit... Smoke On The Border, The 1879 Michigan-Toronto Match

Parts of the Detroit area had air quality readings in the 150s and 160s yesterday, placing them on par with New York City, though the skies appeared clearer here for some reason. Of course, discussing air quality is not Football Archaeology's core competency. Still, it connects with events from 144 years ago when the University of Toronto sent a team through Southern Ontario and across the Detroit River to play the University of Michigan in the Wolverines' second-ever football game.

Earlier, the ...

A. A. Stagg and the Origin of Wind Sprints

The recent Tidbit about the 1919 Army-Boston College game told the story of the origins of grass drills, and it led Jon Crowley, a paid subscriber, to ask about the origins of gassers and similar conditioning drills. I attempted to identify when and where gassers were born, but it proved rather tricky since the search for "gassers' brings up a slew of athletes named Gasser and a few schools with Gassers as the team nickname.

More success came from searching for the origin of "wind sprints." As I ...