A History of Helmet and Face Mask Requirements

About two years ago, I wrote a story about the battle between plastic and leather helmets, mainly how that played out in the 1955 Spalding catalog, which offered four plastic helmet models and three in leather. Why would a manufacturer offer both versions when plastic helmets better-protected players' heads? The answer lies in the NFL and NCAA rules and football practitioners' beliefs about protecting the helmet wearer versus others on the playing field.

Our British cousins defined 59 rules when establishing the Laws of the Rugby Football Union in 1871. Rule 58 banned the wearing of equipment that might harm other players and read:

No one wearing projecting nails, iron plates, or gutta percha on any part of his boots or shoes shall be allowed to play in a match.

Despite gridiron football's evolution from rugby, the idea that players should not wear equipment made of hard and unyielding substances remained in the game. The rule-makers banned some versions of early headgear made of sole leather and generally emphasized the need to pad harder substances that made their way onto football fields. Early shoulder pads, for instance, were padded on the interior and exterior to cushion blows in both directions. Likewise, the original rationale behind football's rules requiring knee pads was not to protect the wearer's knees but the heads of opponents taught to tackle the wearer at the knees. (Football might not need helmets or knee pads if tackling is allowed only above the waist, as in rugby.)

Players, coaches, and equipment manufacturers largely complied with football's ban on stiffer substances until synthetic materials arrived. Nylon and other synthetic fabrics were used in some uniforms in the late 1930s until the Army started encouraging men to jump out of planes with nylon blankets strapped to their backs, at which point, the Army claimed the nation's nylon supplies. Riddell's plastic helmets first saw the field in 1940, though they took a similar vacation when war needs redirected plastic production.

The NFL and NCAA required helmets to be a different color than the ball to avoid the camouflage effect (a standard that still exists but did not directly address the issue of helmets potentially endangering others.

The NCAA required players to wear headgear in 1939, with the NFL following in 1943. Nevertheless, even NFL players were smart enough to wear helmets before that. Dick Plasman was the exception as the last NFL player to go without a helmet during the 1941 season. After returning to the NFL following military service, Plasman donned a leather chapeau to comply with the new rules.