Today’s Tidbit... School Names on Jerseys
An image in the previous story on Street & Smith’s covers showed Michigan State’s Brad Van Pelt with his school’s name or wordmark above the numbers on the front of his jersey.
The image prompted James Gilbert to ask when schools began adding those wordmarks. He postulated that school names were TV-related and provided a picture of Lawrence Taylor from his North Carolina days, noting that coach Dick Crum’s team used wordmarked jerseys only for press photos, not games. I thought the idea of “publicity jerseys” was unusual, but I have since learned that it was quite common for a time.
Determining when schools first added their names to the front of football jerseys is more difficult than you might think. I am unaware of a searchable resource that details such information, so trying to identify when they first appeared required some back-and-forth between:
Newspaper archive searches for “school name on jerseys” and the like
Paging through Street & Smith’s, Spalding Football Guides, and sporting goods catalogs from 1950 to 1965
Relevant college yearbooks
Although the combination of those resources helped to identify early wordmark users, the results are inherently suggestive rather than definitive. Anyway, here’s what I learned.
I started by searching a newspaper archive from 1900 to 1965 since I had a saved yearbook image of a Texas player wearing a wordmarked jersey in 1960. The news archive search turned up a few morsels.
One was a 1941 story about Capital University in Ohio ordering new football jerseys with the school name printed on them. Unfortunately, their supplier misspelled the school name as “Capitol.” The school’s yearbook shows they did not wear wordmarked jerseys during games during the 1941 season, so the ordered jerseys were probably practice jerseys since schools commonly printed school-related information on practice gear to prevent theft, which, ironically, made those items all the more attractive to big men on campus.
A similar story concerned the Rice Owls, whose football jerseys were stolen late in the 1980 season, so they hastily ordered replacements for their season-ender with Houston. Unfortunately, the replacement jerseys misspelled Owls by adding a possessive apostrophe (i.e., Owl’s). Since it was too late to correct the typo, they wore the jerseys for the game, during which the Owls played like a team apostrophe-possessed, blasting Houston off the field, 35-7.
The search also turned up an image of the new football uniforms for Michigan’s Lansing Eastern and Sexton high schools in 1963, with Sexton bearing their school name on the jersey front; the earliest workmarked game jerseys identified so far.
So wordmarked jerseys were around by 1963, but I previously mentioned that I had an image of a Texas player from 1960 with “Texas” on the front of his jersey. Digging into Texas yearbooks showed that Longhorn players began wearing jerseys with Texas on the front for their press photos in 1954. While they used them for press purposes every year, they did not wear them for games through the 1975 season, after which I stopped looking.
Other schools added wordmarks to their jerseys for press photos in the mid-1960s, but also did not wear them in games.
The first college I found to use a wordmark for game jerseys was Michigan State in 1964. MSU is in East Lansing, which borders Lansing, home to Lansing Sexton High, which wore wordmarked jerseys in 1963. Michigan State took the wordmark seriously, putting it on their home and away jerseys.
Other early wordmarkers, such as Texas Tech, used the wordmark only on away-game jerseys.
Many of the elements of football uniforms we take for granted today became common between 1955 and 1965. Though they originated in college, the NFL made helmet logos the norm, while colleges added TV numbers on their helmets, shoulders, and sleeves. Logos on college helmets replaced TV numbers after 1965, about the time wordmarked jerseys came along for publicity purposes and game use. All were branding methods that differentiated each team’s uniforms, making them recognizable in the press and on television.
As suggested early in the story, there may be earlier examples of schools wearing wordmarked jerseys in games. If you know of one, please comment below.
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As documented in How Football Became Football, Maryland was the first college team to put player names on the back of jerseys in 1961.
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My favorite example of word marking was Sooner Greg Pruitt's 'HELLO' on the front and 'GOODBYE' on the back, over the numbers ..