Tim's original Tidbit was the basis of this discussion titled: Before Uniforms Were Uniform - https://www.footballarchaeology.com/p/todays-tidbit-before-uniforms-were

Before the Color-Coordinated Sidelines: When Football Uniforms Weren't Uniform

When you watch a football game today, one of the first things that captures your attention is the perfect, spectacular array of colors and matching uniforms. Every player is perfectly dressed to script, creating an immediate visual identity for the team. But travel back a century, before the roar of World War I, and this uniformity simply didn't exist.

We recently had the pleasure of speaking with football historian Timothy P. Brown of footballarchaeology.com to explore this forgotten chapter of the game, which he calls the era “Before Uniforms Were Uniform.”

Brown highlights that the contrast between then and now largely boils down to socio-economic circumstances. A hundred years ago, wealth and possessions were scarce. Many people owned one nice suit and a set of work clothes. This financial reality transferred directly onto the gridiron. While elite programs like Harvard and Yale could afford to outfit their players in matching red or blue stocking caps and hose, the reality for the majority of teams was drastically different.

Especially in small towns, the high school team was often just a group of kids coached by a faculty member. The school itself provided no equipment or uniforms. Instead, players were responsible for supplying their own gear—if you brought your own pencil to school, you brought your own jersey to the game.

The resulting team photos from this era are a historian’s delight. They show players wearing a disparate collection of hand-me-down pants, mismatched sweaters, borrowed nose guards, and even crude, homemade shoulder pads sewn right onto the exterior of a jersey. If the school color was red, a player might borrow a brother’s red sweater, but the goal of uniformity was often an impossible standard to meet.

This lack of standardization wasn't limited to small-town football. Even major programs struggled. Brown cites a 1916 Ohio State team photo where some players wore the "cool new" friction-strip jerseys, while second and third-stringers sported the old, non-matching gear. Budgets simply didn't allow for an entire inventory replacement all at once.

This extended to early professional football as well. It was common for players on teams like the Franklin All-Stars to simply wear their college sweaters—adorned with the logos of their alma maters—to professional games. The idea of distinct home and away jerseys also didn't take hold until the 1950s, when the rise of black-and-white television forced teams to adopt contrasting colors so viewers could tell them apart.

Today, we take perfectly matched uniforms for granted, but reflecting on this era offers a profound appreciation for the players of yesteryear. They were a generation that played hard with the little they had, demonstrating grit that truly cemented their place in football history.

To explore more fascinating tidbits and forgotten history of the gridiron, visit Timothy P. Brown’s work at footballarchaeology.com.

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One of the first things you see in witnessing a football game is the spectacular array of colors and uniforms that the teams are wearing. They're all dressed the same on each team, but there's a time when they weren't.

And we're going to take you down memory lane to connect you to the years of yesteryear Before World War I with Timothy P. Brown of hoopoarchaeology.com when uniforms weren't uniform. It's all coming up with Tim in just a moment.

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

Before we get into our episode today, let's take the time to drill that football right into the like and subscribe button on your console so you know exactly when the notifications come up of the latest releases of Pixie and Dispatch podcast for some more great football history. Now onto our episode. Hello, my football friends.

This is Darin Hayes of pigskindispatch.com welcome once again to the Pig Pen, your portal to puzzle football history. And welcome to another episode where we get to talk with Timothy p. Brown of footballarchaeology.com Tim, welcome back to the Pig Pen.

Hey there. Look forward to chatting. And again, I'm dad jokeless tonight on this one.

Well, that's very disappointing, Tim, because you know how uniform we are of keeping a standard here and staying to script.

Okay, let me think. 1. No, I can't think of one.

All right. Well, my.

My poor attempt at it at least got us part of the way there because of course we're segueing into a tidbit that Tim wrote titled before Uniforms were Uniform. A lot of uniformity there, Tim. So what can you tell us about this story?

Well, it's kind of a same old, same old story in some ways, I guess, dad joke. So, you know, I think this is one of these things where, you know, if you think about, you know, where.

Where we are today as a society, we are so wealthy, we have so many possessions, we have so much stuff compared to people who lived, you know, let's call it 100 years ago and maybe, maybe even a little bit further back. And, you know, I mean, there are a lot of people, they had one. One suit. And other than that, you know, they lived on a farm or whatever.

They had work clothes and then they had one set of nice clothes, right? And that was Pretty normal, you know, so anyways, and so that kind of, that kind of situation, that condition transferred over to the football field.

And so especially like in small towns where, you know, the high school team often it was just kids getting together, you know, it wasn't, they might have a faculty member that coached them. And that was increasingly the case over time. But, but the high school didn't have equipment, you know, they didn't have uniforms.

Each kid supplied their own stuff. You know, it's like you bring your own pencil to school, you bring your uniform to practice and to the games.

And so there were a lot of kids who just, you know, if the school color was blue or red or orange, they tried to wear something of that color, right? They borrow their brother's sweater or whatever it may have been, or have mom knit one or whatever. But you know, a lot of times it didn't work.

And so, you know, I collect RPPC is not this in this post or this, the original tidbit?

You know, I show a bunch of images of all these small town teams and these kids just wearing basically whatever they had, you know, hand me down pants, hand me down jerseys, hand me down nose guards, handmade or homemade shoulder pads sewn on the exterior of their jersey.

So, you know, this idea that everybody has to be uniform was kind of the, that was the standard, but that wasn't necessarily the reality, if, you know, if that makes sense. And especially, you know, less advantaged, you know, situations.

So that's just one of those funny things where, you know, team uniforms then in a lot of cases were just like when you were a kid and you got, you know, 20 kids out in the local park or in somebody's backyard and you played, you didn't all have blue shirts and red shirts and you know, whatever, you just wore whatever you had and somehow we figured out who was on that team, who's on the other team. Right. But in, you know, I will say too that there, there are times that even that kind of thing also even transferred to big time programs.

And so there's guys on the team who have the cool new friction strip jerseys, and then there's a second and third stringers who don't. Right.

So, you know, even at a place like an Ohio State that, you know, had had means at that time, even they didn't just have the budget to just buy all new uniforms for everybody all at once. You bought a certain number each year and you hope that they more or less look the same.

But if you made the decision to go to friction strips in year one, not everybody was going to have them.

So, you know, it's just one of those things, you know, I mean, if you think about it, you know, if you got kids that have played travel baseball or travel football or whatever, you know, no one goes out without having the same uniforms. And I mean, I remember even, like, as a grade schooler, you know, somebody's mom would have bleached the uniform or something like that. So it's.

It's all faded. And so that kid, you know, looks like a dork. Right. But there's no way anybody was going to replace that uniform.

That just meant that that uniform was.

Just going to your mom like Clorox, I take it then.

Yeah, well, no, I wasn't that kid. I was.

Not that.

I had two older brothers from. My mom knew better by the time I came. So. Yeah. But anyways, I mean, it's just one of those things we just.

We take for granted that everybody's going to have the same uniform and it just didn't work that way. And you know, I mean, they're just.

So anyways, just kind of a, you know, again, just if it's Thanksgiving or Christmas or whenever this, you know, whatever season it is, you know, be thankful that you have so much stuff and that your favorite team does, too.

Yeah, this occurred back in early pro football, too. I mean, it was really prevalent then because people would just wear their college sweaters and then go play for this pro team.

The COVID of my first book, the World's Greatest Pro Grid Iron Team, has a picture of The Franklin team on the COVID front to back. And I had more than one person come to me and say, hey, this is a Franklin all star team. How come nobody has an F on their jersey?

There's P's and there's W's. And you know, because people were, you know, Penn Quakers, they were playing for Philadelphia Athletics was an NFL team, original NFL team there.

W and J players are on there. They would just wear their, whatever they had their. And most of it was their college sweaters. And they, they took their team photograph that way too.

Same way they played the game. So. Yeah, so definitely prevalent everywhere in football at all levels.

Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, there's some of the, some of the small town stuff. You can see somebody has like, it's an insignia from.

That's totally unrelated to the town, the town name. Right. Or the high school name.

Right.

But that's what they had. So, you know, that's what you wore.

Yeah. Wow.

That, I mean, that's just a great way to go back and appreciate what people went through when they went to observe a football game or played a football game. And you know, you just, you did what you had, you stayed within your means and that was the time.

And you know, some of the greatest generations are because of that, that they, they worked hard and played hard because they didn't have much.

And you capture this a lot in your work, talking about, you know, football history and your football archeology and maybe you could share with people where they can enjoy some of these writings and other ventures that you do.

Yeah, just the easiest thing is to just go to footballarchaeology.com it's my substack site, and subscribe. And if you do, every time I, you know, publish an article, you'll get an email that contains the article itself.

And if you don't want to get the emails, then just subscribe on the, or follow me or subscribe on the substack site. So it'll show up, you know, within the application, but not, you know, by email.

You can also just follow me on Blue sky because I do post, you know, every time that I, every time I publish a new article, I post it on, on Blue sky as well. So. Or just bookmark, you know, the, the site. Come on out whenever you want to.

All right, Tim.

Well, we really appreciate you preserving the football history and coming and sharing stories like this with us and, and we would love to have you come back as we enter this new year and tell some, some brand new football stories that people haven't heard for maybe a century.

Ring in the new year with a with an old story.

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

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