Today's Tidbit... Adopting Helmet Logos By Rose Bowl Teams

Following on yesterday’s theme concerning helmet logos, I wanted to look at the time between the 1948 Los Angeles Rams busting out their horns and college teams adding helmet logos. To really determine the adoption curve, I’d have to find images for hundreds of college teams over a few decades, but even I wouldn’t do that, so I took a far narrower path, looking only at the Rose Bowl teams starting in 1949.

By then, the Rose Bowl was the annual matchup between the West Coast trendsetters and the hardworking Midwest industrialists. The Big Ten and Pac 8 had high-profile, well-funded programs capable of adding helmet logos whenever they damn well pleased, so those visiting Pasadena in January should have been a reasonable approximation of the state of college football; so let’s see how it turned out.

1949: Northwestern and Cal did not feature logos.

(hailtopurple.com)

1950: Ohio State and Cal lacked logos.