Today's Tidbit... Name On Tape (NOT) On Football Helmets

Elements of football history that are part of the rules or occur in games are more accessible to research than more informal parts of football. Teams’ practice and offseason activities are also not as well documented as other parts of the game. For example, college yearbooks show team pictures, crowd shots, and game action images, but few describe and include photos of practices and offseason workouts. Likewise, newspaper reports on team practices often told which players were running with which units but generally did not detail specific drills or the gear players wore during practice.

Knowing that limitation, I tried to determine when, where, and why football players first began practicing with strips of tape on their helmets on which was written their surname.

Having your name written on tape and stuck to the front of your helmet is almost as significant a right of passage as wearing the helmet itself, yet little is written about this important ritual. Anyway, the earliest references I found for tape on the helmets are from the mid-1950s, so why did the name-on-tape (NOT) trend start then? My guesstimate is that football rosters and coaching staffs grew in the 1950s, even though two-platoon football went away for a while. As a result, coaches could not keep track of all the players on the roster as well as they had before. In addition, the 1950s witnessed the ramp-up of players wearing plastic helmets and face masks, so perhaps players were not as immediately recognizable as in the past. A third contributor may have been that coaches who had served in the military, where some units had their names on tape during boot camp, followed the same practice on the gridiron.