The Origins of Home and Away Jerseys: Cornell's Vested Interest

Like other sports, one of football's early challenges was getting competing to teams wear sufficiently distinct uniforms that players, officials, and fans could tell one from the other. During football's rugby days, teams often wore stocking caps and socks of different colors and striping. Colored sweaters continued distinguishing one team from another even when most players wore canvas vests over their sweaters from 1877 until the mid-1910s.

The 1908 Huron College football team poses in its vested uniforms; eight have "shoulder pads" sewn onto their jerseys.

As detailed in How Football Became Football, most teams continued wearing dark jerseys and earth-tone pants into the 1940s. Few teams consistently wore white, gray, or other light colors. The situation was problematic in conferences with multiple teams with similar colors, particularly given the more muted dyes of the day. For example, the Big Nine, now Big Ten, had five teams wear one shade of red or another: Ohio State (scarlet), Indiana (crimson), Chicago (maroon), Wisconsin (cardinal), and Minnesota (maroon). Beginning in the 1910s, some teams distinguished themselves by painting their leather helmets, but football did not have a consistent system to ensure opposing teams wore uniforms of contrasting colors.

Newspaper columnists and reporters frequently complained about teams wearing similar colors, especially when covering games played on muddy fields. The reporters complained when the black jerseys worn by Army bore little difference from the Middies' Navy blue jerseys in 1916 and 1919. Some schools meeting a similarly-hued team took the initiative by borrowing jerseys from a third team. Throop Institute, the future Cal Tech, did just that before their 1919 game with Redlands. When Nebraska visited Rutgers in 1920, the Scarlet Knights wore black jerseys, leading to many Rutgers faithful cheering for the redshirted Cornhuskers in the game's early moments. Rockne dressed his boys in green when they visited the black-shirted Iowa Hawkeyes in 1921.

Multiple articles in the early 1920s discussed the emerging consensus that the home team should ensure their jerseys differed from the visiting team, the opposite of the tradition that ultimately took hold. The image at the top of the post shows Cornell hosting Colgate in 1920 when the wide white band running across the torso of Cornell's jerseys helped differentiate the two teams.