Whirling Towards the Future

First and foremostly, I would like to dedicate this Writing the Bench entry to Eva Solomon Wade, who suggested an entry about the history of football uniforms. Unfortunately, Eva, the history of football team uniforms is not remotely interesting. I was disappointed, too. I was really hoping for some juicy stories about like, the Buffalo Bills wearing brown, but then somebody forming the Cleveland Browns and of course they'd want to wear brown, and nobody being smart enough to say, like, “Gentlemen, gentlemen! There's no need to fight because home uniforms are white anyway!” and then a consultant from the Tampa Bay Buccaneers would run in and declare that the Bills uniforms were ocher and the Browns uniforms were chocolate, and anybody who thought that those were the same colors should have their amateur pilot's license revoked because they were obviously colorblind. And then they'd all have a good laugh and go drink mojitos or something.

Nothing like that ever happened. But I did find this awesome photo of the 1904 OshKosh Normals (actual team). It took me a few minutes to realize that those sweaters have the letter O for OshKosh on them—it's not a team full of guys all wearing the number zero.



But don't worry, Eva, because all is not lost! Football uniforms as such don't really have much of a story to tell, but football pads have actually had a pretty interesting evolution. Apparently, the first game of what we now call “football” was a competition between Princeton and Rutgers, but it was less like a game of football than it was a very violent game of capture the flag with a ball instead of a flag. Then as now, the violence was the real appeal of the game, because, as we all know, Victorian collegiates were known mainly for committing mindless acts of violence.

That was a joke, of course. The violence was anything but mindless. In fact, during the first twenty years of football play, football games became more and more intense, featuring many common infantry tactics such as the “Flying Wedge,” and the most padding any player really wore was a handkerchief on their head. Players suspected of trying to wear any sort of protective padding were decried as “pansies,” “Nancy-boys,” and “future Tampa Bay Buccaneers.”

As more and more football games resulted in injury and death, however, the rules were continually adjusted to make things safer, and more and more players chose to wear leather helmets to make themselves look more like George Clooney, which in turn led to a major increase in the amount of sex that college football players were having with silent movie stars (a tradition carried out to this day by Reggie Bush and Kim Kardashian). By the 1920s these helmets were almost universally accepted, thanks to the efforts of Clara Bow.

Facemasks were added gradually but had become standard by the 1950s, and as America developed into the insurocracy in which we now live, players increasingly accepted their clubs' encouragement to wear more and more safety gear. Demand inspired supply: since the NFL made padding standard, and all players were wearing it, manufacturers decided to specialize, and for the last two decades, safety gear for each individual position in the NFL has become more and more distinct, and basic equipment has gotten more and more high tech—the University of Florida's College of Medicine has developed a way to air-condition shoulder pads as a means of regulating players' body temperature, and Skynet is working on a new robot that may change the face of football forever. I'm sure there's no way that can go wrong.