When Football Coaches Wore Football Pants

Baseball managers and coaches have long dressed like their players, while basketball and hockey coaches wear suits or other street clothes rather than the shorts or pads and sweaters of their respective sports. So, why did football coaches often wear football gear in the past and then tra­nsition to street or team gear?

To answer that question, we need to return to football's beginning in America's colleges and universities when the teams did not have coaches for philosophical and practical reasons. Philosophically, the teams were student-run organizations that elected captains to organize practices and determine who played in games. The student orientation carried over into rules prohibiting coaching from the sideline that, among other things, ensured that quarterbacks called the plays until the elimination of those rules in the 1960s.

Practically, football was a new game in the 1880s, and the people who knew it best were the current and recently graduated players. There were no elders able to impart knowledge, so a tradition began that recent graduates would return to campus to impart their knowledge to the current players. This system worked well for Yale, Harvard, and Princeton, which had played the game since its start, but not so well for Kansas State, California, or Stanford. They did not have alums with playing experience, so they hired recent Big Three alums to instruct them on the game. 

American sports then borrowed a British term to describe these instructors. As in America, the British used "coach" to describe horse-drawn vehicles that carried people from one place to another. University of Oxford students in the 1830s used "coach" as slang for a tutor that carried a student through his classes. The term carried over to sports instructors and then crossed the water. "Football coach" first appeared in an American newspaper in 1889, one year after "baseball coach" made its premiere.

Returning to the gear worn by football coaches, teams in football's early days had rosters comprised of players like Pop Warner, who arrived on Cornell's campus having never played football. Many trying out for the football team had never seen a game, so the alumni coaches spent their time on the basics, teaching the rudiments of stances, tackling, and the like to the new players. Of course, they could not teach these techniques using film -Harvard did not create the first football training film until 1905- so they donned their football gear and joined the players in the trenches.

A Yale alum instructed team members on proper tackling form in 1912. (Courtesy of the Yale University Library)