Yesterday, the U.S.P.S. brought me the 1932 revision/supplement to F.A. Lambert’s 1926 volume, How to Officiate Football. As the first, or one of the first, books detailing the philosophy and mechanics of officiating, it influenced the state and regional organizations that formed at the time to train and schedule officials.

Officials did not consistently wear uniforms before the 1920s when they began wearing white (with black socks) as seen in Lambert’s picture above. While his organization opted for generic white, he commented positively on the Southern Football Officials Association’s (SFOA) spin on the regulation uniform and jacket.

Lambert also argued for officials to:

• Arrive clean-shaven in a clean uniform

• Not wear a coat over their white shirt unless, like SFOA officials, they have a regulation jacket.

For more on the appearance of officials, the following articles cover the evolution of officials’ uniforms from football’s birth to the 1960s.

Football Archaeology

How Football's Zebras Got Their Stripes

It is easy to see football today and think the game’s evolutionary path was inevitable, but there is nothing pre-ordained about today’s game. Football might have taken any number of alternative paths, and often did, though many of those twists and turns are forgotten today. Consider that American football was played on a field with a 55-yard line and no end zones until 1912. Only the tweaking of the rules of the recently allowed forward pass led to the adding of end zones and the elimination of the 55-yard line. Likewise, the first wearing of numbered jerseys came in 1905 when rivals Drake and Iowa State met. Drake wore numbers between 1 and 25; the Cyclones wore 26 to 50. As numbered jerseys became popular, players were not numbered by position. Even when the NCAA mandated that player numbers correspond to their position, there were multiple systems proposed, including alphanumeric combinations tried by a handful of schools…

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2 years ago · Timothy P. Brown

Football Archaeology

More Alternatives to Zebra Shirts

Each week, schools across the nation excitedly announce the unique combination of colors and styles their teams will wear that weekend. Yet, despite the hype, the never-ending variety all starts to look the same. The weekly new duds, you might say, have jumped the proverbial duck. Conversely, the other guys on football fields – the officials- show up game after game in the same black-and-white striped shirts to unerringly make their calls…

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a year ago · Timothy P. Brown

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