Today's Tidbit... Before Friday Night Lights

There was a time in this country when everyone knew their place and respected the traditions that made it great. High schools played football on Friday nights, colleges played on Saturday, and the pros owned Sunday. All was right with the world.

Unfortunately, our vision of the past is something of a myth, at least concerning the early days. For much of football's history, the Friday night lights tradition did not exist because lighting bright enough to light a football field did not exist other than for the occasional novelty game. As discussed in Shedding Light on Football's Early Night Games, stadium lighting was relatively poor into the 1930s, even at stadiums used by the colleges and pros. Most high schools played on Friday or Saturday afternoons until Friday night high school football became popular in the 1950s. 

Despite deep pockets back then, Wauwatosa High School’s lights would be considered inadequate today. (1938 Wauwatosa (WI) High School yearbook)

If any group can argue for pioneering Friday night football, it was urban and small colleges. A page from a 1933 publication shows that some urban Catholic universities played a share of their home games on Friday nights. (Other pages list 70 or so college games played in daylight on Saturdays.) Like the urban schools, small colleges played on Friday nights to avoid competing with the Saturday games played by local high schools and major colleges games on the radio.