Today's Tidbit... Getting A Head Of The Game

I feel comfortable claiming to be in the top one percent of goofballs who look at one-hundred-year-old yearbooks and sports pages for information and images on old football teams. That experience allows me to note that newspaper and publicity folks in the Teens and Twenties liked to create collages of teams comprised of the players’ faces. The layout allowed the squeezing of many faces in limited space. Here’s an example.

The 1918 Mare Island Marines lost to Great Lakes in the 1919 Rose Bowl.

Another advantage of the approach was its use for composite teams, like a conference all-star team. The players’ faces could be pulled from multiple sources and melded into something coherent.

'Big Ten All Stars,' Post Crescent (Appleton, WI), November 25, 1927.

As usual, the backfielders get more glory than the linemen by receiving the full or partial body treatment, though Gilbert of Michigan sacrificed the fingers of his right hand to make that happen.

Anyway, if one of you Photoshop wizards out there want to create a similar graphic for a current All-Star team, I’ll be happy to share it with others.

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