A History of the Football: Ch. 3 Pt. 1

In addition to changes to the football's size, shape, bladders, and lacing, the ball has undergone cosmetic changes due to five historical influences, most of which had a functional basis.

The first factor to influence the appearance of football was durability. Footballs began as inflated animal bladders made more durable when covered with leather. While we will discuss at least one serious candidate to replace leather as the ball covering, leather remains today's preferred cover.

The second set of cosmetic changes resulted from a desire for improved visibility. Teams painted footballs white, yellow, or red to make them easier to see on poorly lit practice fields and later for games in dimly lit stadiums.

The third factor influencing the football's appearance was camouflage, or, more correctly, the opposite of camouflage. At times, concerns were raised about teams whose uniform coloring made it more difficult for defenders to identify which offensive player had the ball. Whether it was tan pants, helmets, and patches on the jerseys or white uniforms that concealed snazzy white footballs, the camouflage concern helped drive the addition of striping on footballs.

The fourth driver of the ball's appearance has been handedness. Handedness concerns led to eliminating or shifting the ball's stripes to ensure that passers' thumbs did not rest on paint, which those insufferable quarterbacks claimed made the ball more slippery.

The fifth influence is branding. While more amorphous than the first four factors, eliminating or retaining the stripes on the balls used at different levels has served as a means of branding and distinguishing college, CFL, and NFL balls.

Durability

As covered in previous chapters, the ancestors of our gridiron football emerged from games played when most residents of the British Isles were peasants. Those peasants occasionally found an animal bladder worth blowing up, leading them to spend an afternoon joyously kicking it around. After several centuries, an intelligent peasant recognized that covering the animal bladder with leather made the ball last longer. Longer-lasting balls were convenient and more posh, especially the well-made balls sold to schoolboys by local cobblers.

The ball was tan or brown because that was the color leather took on during the tanning process, and there was no particular reason to color the ball differently.

Visibility

The emergence of football in colors other than tan or brown resulted from the desire to practice and play under artificial light. Thomas Edison filed his first patent for electric light bulbs in October 1878, two years after the IFA met to define football's first rules. The initial games played under electric lights occurred indoors in orchestra and exhibition halls, while the first known outdoor game played under the lights came in 1892 when Mansfield State Normal met Wyoming Seminary. The combination of poor lighting and fog led them to stop the game at halftime. Similar lighted outdoor games occurred here and there before lighting technology improved to allow semi-regular night games in the 1920s.

While there were attempts to play at night, games that ended in darkness were more common because games traditionally started at 2:00 P.M. or 2:30 P.M. The start times allowed fans to do chores or work on Saturday morning while giving visiting teams time to travel to the game location by train. Most games finished within two hours, so artificial lighting was necessary only when the match started late or ran longer than usual.

Things got worse after the introduction of Daylight Saving Time in 1918. After several years of late-season games ending in the poor light of dusk, a 1922 rule allowed referees to confer with the team captains at halftime to shorten the second half if needed. Some schools combatted the problem by starting their games an hour or two earlier, a few lit their fields, and others painted their footballs white, yellow, or red to increase their visibility. 

The earliest reference to footballs that are not tan or brown came in 1901 when late classes forced Amos Alonzo Stagg's University of Chicago team to practice under the lights. Stagg had his team use a white football when practicing under their primitive lighting system. 

White footballs became more prominent in the 1920s as teams began playing semi-regular night games due to advances in lighting technology and the stadium-building boom. Teams painted the balls until the manufacturers began offering white or yellow versions of their higher-priced balls by the early 1930s. Early on, the catalogs did not show examples of lighter-skinned or "ghost" balls but later included images of white balls among their offerings.