Today's Tidbit... Digging Into A Mystery Image

I did not have a Today's Tidbit written while browsing Twitter and saw that Paul Lukas at Uni Watch had asked whether anyone could identify the teams playing in the picture below. Since I solved the mystery earlier today, I thought it would be fun to document the path I took to get there. The story shows that first impressions count -for good and bad- and that the truth is often revealed only by looking at the complete picture and not getting caught up in specific details.

The mystery image was posted on Twitter this morning.

By the time I saw Paul's tweet, others had already made guesses about the image, including several pointing to Notre Dame as one of the teams, which made sense to me. Like another commenter, I thought the uniforms were from the mid-to-late 1930s, which led me to get caught up in what appeared to be the obvious answer.