The Evolution of the Pigskin: Why Do Some Footballs Have Stripes?

Have you ever looked closely at a football and wondered why the college game uses those iconic white stripes while the NFL ball is a solid, sleek brown? It seems like a minor detail, but as with everything in the gridiron's past, there is a fascinating story of utility, survival, and "hidden ball" trickery behind those markings.

On a 2022 episode of the Pigskin Daily History Dispatch, host Darin Hayes sat down with Timothy Brown, the historian behind Football Archaeology, to dig into the "biography" of the ball itself. From its origins as a fat rugby egg to the high-tech prolate spheroid of today, the football has undergone a radical transformation.

1934: The Year the "Egg" Died

In the early days of American football, the ball was essentially a rugby ball—a fat, ovoid shape that was perfect for running and kicking but nearly impossible to throw with precision. Everything changed in 1934.

A rule change that year led to a sleeker, pointier design. This new shape made the forward pass easier for players with smaller hands, effectively birthing the "spiral" as a primary weapon. However, this evolution came at a cost: the pointier ends made the ball bounce unpredictably on the ground, effectively killing the drop kick as a reliable scoring method.

The Birth of the Stripe: BYU and Hidden Ball Tricks

The white stripes we see on college and high school balls today weren't always there. In fact, for decades, night games were played with balls painted entirely white or yellow to help visibility under primitive incandescent stadium lights.

According to Brown, the first recorded use of a striped brown ball occurred in 1936 during a game between BYU and Northern Colorado. The teams were at an impasse: BYU wore white jerseys, and Northern Colorado wore brown pants. There were genuine concerns that players could hide a white or brown ball against their uniforms for "hidden ball" tricks. The compromise? A brown ball with white stripes. It provided the necessary contrast against both uniforms and eventually became a blueprint for the sport.

The NFL vs. The NCAA: A Split in Identity

For a time, both the NFL and college football experimented with various markings. The NFL used white balls for night games until 1956, after which they transitioned to a tan ball with white stripes. However, in 1976, the NFL made a permanent change, removing the stripes entirely to create a clean, professional look that differentiated the league from the college game.

The NCAA, however, chose a different path. They sanctioned stripes in 1965 and formally adopted them in 1975. There were two main reasons:

1. Visibility:Many college stadiums lacked the high-powered lighting found in pro arenas.
2. Branding:The stripes became a visual shorthand for the Saturday afternoon collegiate atmosphere.

The "Slippery Thumb" Dilemma

If you look at a modern NCAA football, you’ll notice the stripes only cover the top two panels (adjacent to the laces). This is known as the half-stripe.

This design was an engineering solution to a player complaint. In the mid-20th century, when stripes were painted around the entire circumference, quarterbacks complained that the paint was too slippery. When a QB’s thumb hit the painted stripe, it lost the friction needed for a perfect release. The NFL solved this by removing the stripes; the NCAA solved it by simply leaving the bottom panels unpainted where the thumb naturally rests.

Conclusion: A Legacy of Practicality

Today, the presence or absence of stripes is mostly an aesthetic choice, but their history is rooted in the practical needs of the game. Whether it’s the CFL keeping full stripes on all four panels or the USFL experimenting with stars instead of lines, the football continues to be a canvas for the sport's evolution.

Next time you see a quarterback launch a deep ball, take a look at those white streaks spinning through the air—you’re looking at a solution to a 100-year-old problem.

One of the top experts in early gridiron history, Timothy P. Brown, joins us in the discussion to identify why some footballs have stripes on them. Timothy Brown's FootballArchaeology.com has a daily football factoid that he shares that is really quite interesting in a short read. They preserve football history in a unique way, and we are quite happy that Tim has agreed to join us each week to go over some of his Today's Tidbits. Click that link, and you can subscribe for free to receive them yourself each evening. On Twitter, you can find him @FoFStrife.

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It's Tuesday and once again it's time

to dig in a little bit of

football history with our friend, historian Timothy brown of the footballarchaeology.com website. Today we're going to talk about some of the football's markings and the stripes on the ball themselves coming up in just a moment.

This is the Pigskin Daily History Dispatch, a podcast that covers the anniversaries of American football events throughout history on a day to day basis. Your host, Darren Hayes is podcasting from America's North Shore to bring you the memories of the gridiron one day at a time.

So as we come out of the tunnel of the Sports History Network, let's take the field and go no huddle through the portal of positive gridiron history with pigskindispatch.com

this podcast is part of the Sports History Network, your headquarters for the yesteryear of your favorite sport. You can learn more@sportshistorynetwork.com hello my football friends.

This is Darren Hayes of pigskindispatch.com welcome once again to the Pig Pen here portal to positive football history. And we're going to stare down that portal today and go back some of the balls themselves on the gridiron.

And we have our friend from football archeology, Timothy Brown, the great author and historian. Tim, welcome back to the Pig Pen.

Hey there. Thanks for having me back and hopefully you and the listeners are enjoying the process. I certainly am.

Yeah. This is a blast. And it's, and folks, it's even more fun when you can get the daily tidbits delivered to your email or checking on social media.

And Tim, if you don't mind, we'll do it again at the end. But why don't you give your social media and your website so, so people can enjoy this.

Yeah, so my, my website is footballarchaeology.com so real straightforward name and it's on a, it's a substack platforms so it's very easy. You just subscribe, provide your email, subscribe to it.

And so each day you'll get a daily tidbit or today's tidbit and then two to three times a week you'll get an additional email with either a full article, a link to this podcast or some other kind of information that's football history related. I also post on Twitter under the name football, archaeology and FOFs.

We'll have those in the show notes folks. We'll also mention it at the end of this episode.

Right now, football archeology is the perfect name, Tim, you chose because you are sort of the Indiana Jones of the gridiron history. You really.

You really dig into the dirt, and we're expecting you to find, you know, the Ark of the Covenant and everything else going on, maybe Lombardi's sweat socks or something. But we have, you know, got some interesting things, as you do every week, as you do every day that you share with us every week here on the podcast.

Now, today, we're going to talk a little bit about the footballs. In a recent post, you had. And some of the striping on the footballs. Yeah.

So, you know, this is just one of those things that, you know, I spend time looking through old college yearbooks and, you know, just looking for images that say something about the game and how it differed from. From today. And so in the course of doing that in the past, I've come across just changes, several different changes to the ball itself.

And so, of course, you know, so I'm going to go way back first before talking about the stripes. But, you know, football started as rugby.

And so initially we used the rugby ball, so it was, you know, much more of an egg shape or ovoid or oval, you know, so. But basically it was a lot fatter, and it went through a couple different stages of slimming down.

But by becoming pointier, it also, by and large, eliminated the dropkick from the game. You know, the ball just bounced more unpredictably because of the pointier nose.

Guys were in class till late, and so he had that practice late. So he installed lights fairly early on and used a white football for practice.

And then, you know, typically when people were played early night games, they. They use either a white or a yellow painted ball.

But that wasn't because of night game. It was because they were kind of arguing over whether they should use a white ball when one of the team.

When BYU is going to wear white jerseys and Northern Colorado was going to wear brown pants. So they didn't want to wear. Use a brown ball. So they agreed on a brown ball with white stripes.

And because otherwise, you know, they were concerned about hidden ball tricks and those kinds of things. Right. Something we just don't, you know, don't really think about anymore. And then, you know, kind of.

I don't know that the strike ball really got used a whole lot until then.

In the early 50s, as more and more teams were playing night games, they just weren't, you know, it was just typically they were using this white ball or white ball with black stripes, and in other cases, they used a brown ball with either one or two white stripes. So, you know, so it was just, just like anything else. Football had to go through this kind of testing out or trying out period. You know, me.

We all know where the stripes belong in a football now, but they had to kind of figure that out for a while. So early on, some of the manufacturers put the stripes further towards the middle of the ball, so they actually overlapped the ends of the laces.

Now they're further out beyond the laces, and the ball also went. So. And some of them had two sets of stripes on each side.

So there'd be the one that overlapped the race, the laces, and then the other one more or less where our laces or our. The stripes go today. So then we got. Then they got into a thing, you know, the.

And the NCAA, even though people were using the striped ball, they officially sanctioned it in 65 and then formally adopted the strike ball in. If I said 75, I meant 65, and then formally adopted it in 75. So it's just, you know, and then this.

Well, the other thing is that whether people realize it or not, the. The ball originally had the white stripes or the black stripes. You know, it was the full circumference of the ball. Right.

And then quarterbacks complained that the, the paint was slippery on their thumb and so they basically, the NFL for a while took the stripe off of one of the four panels of a football.

So wherever that quarterback's thumb, you know, would have been, so a right handed quarterback, it would have been, you know, the bottom of the side of one side.

If it's a left handed quarterback, they had to have another set of another ball there or set of balls because their thumb is, you know, is on a different side of the ball.

And so then when the NFL, or I'm sorry, when, when the NCAA moved to the white stripe, as this is now a requirement, they put the white stripe only on the top panel, two panels in the ball.

So the side, the sides that the laces are on.

That is correct.

That is correct.

Now the CFL has stripes on all four panels.

So apparently the, I always like to say that the Canadian, Canadian thumbs aren't as slippery as, as American thumbs, even though most of the quarterbacks up there are Americans anyways.

Right.

So this is one of those goofy little combinations of, you know, different levels of football have chosen different ways to either incorporate stripes or not, you know, and it took a little while for each of them to kind of figure out what, how they wanted to do it.

That's, that's pretty, pretty neat stuff. That's pretty good history. And I know just to take it to a modern twist is probably just all esthetics, but I saw the USFL this year.

Their stripes were just a series of stars going around the circumference of the ball on each. And the normal stripes would be.

No, I did not pick up on that. I didn't.

Yeah, it's kind of different just to be their own ball, I guess.

Yeah, I mean there's, I'm just going to turn around here.

I've got a, I've got an Arena League ball, you know, up on the shelf behind me, but that doesn't, did not have any stripes, at least at the time that it bounced into the stands to me and my sons.

I learned I was talking to a childhood friend of mine. He ended up kicking for Pitt and played on some NFL team. Sean Connolly.

And we, in a recent interview we had with him, he was talking about where the sweet spot is for a kicker. And it's basically, it's a nickel size, I believe he identified as sort of right in that area where the stripe is.

And he said, you know, he didn't kick in high school, but he kicked the high school ball. He's A soccer player. That's how he got his practice into. Want to try out, you know, be a walk on at pit.

And he said he's practiced with a striped ball and that's where the sweet spot is, goes to the college ball. You know, the stripes are missing on the side he wants to kick on because he want laces out.

You know, Ray Finkel or Roy Finkel, whatever his name was in that movie. But he said, and then you go to the NFL, NFL, there's no stripes, so you have to. But it's in that general area where the stripes are. But just not.

Doesn't have anything to do with the stripe. But I thought it was something.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, you know, one of the things that, you know, people don't, you know, like old photographs of night football games, part of it's just, you know, the cameras weren't as good and the shutter speeds, you know, they had weren't able to adjust some of that the way people can today. But, you know, like the early, early incandescent bulbs versus today's LEDs, the LEDs put out like you know, 40 times more, you know, more light.

So you can just imagine how, how dim the lighting was in some of those early, early attempts to play night football. So they needed, they needed a white ball and they needed stripes a whole lot more than we need them today.

Well, fascinating stuff as always. We thank you for sharing that history with us. And why don't you give out more time and your social media and we thank you for that history.

Yeah, so footballarchaeology.com and then so just subscribe for free, see if you like it. And if you do, just keep. You'll get one every day. And then I'm also on Twitter and I said fofs earlier, but it's at fof strife.

So that's, that's my, my Twitter handle. But also, you know, search football archaeology and you'll on Twitter and you'll find me right away.

Okay. And like we said, folks, if you're driving a car right now listening to this podcast, we thank you for that.

You can, when you pull over and get some safety, check the show notes and on pigskindispatch.com we'll have Tim's information there as well to get you to him. Tim Brown, thank you once again and we'll talk to you again next week.

Very good. Look forward to seeing you. Thanks.

That's all the football history we have today, folks. Join us back tomorrow for more of your football history.

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