Football Uniforms Through the Years
7/26/2011 12:00:00 AM | Football
July 26, 2011
RALEIGH, N.C. – There’s no good idea of what the uniforms worn by the first football team at the North Carolina School for Agriculture and Mechanic Arts looked like back in 1892. The only thing that any one knows for sure is that the school colors, chosen by the fledgling institution’s literary societies, were pink and blue.
No reliable history remains to suggest those colors were actually part of the uniforms those first three seasons or if they were just used as decorations by the fans and “rooters” attending the games. The same is true for 1895, the single season in which brown and white were the football team’s chosen colors.
Since 1896, when students voted to change permanently the school colors to red and white, there have been all kinds of different uniform designs, including the newest, which was unveiled on Tuesday.
For the first quarter-century of football at the school, there were no colors, no numerals and certainly no names on the jerseys. The NCAA required all schools to add numbers to the backs of all jerseys in 1916, and to the fronts and backs of all jerseys in 1937.
The only adornment in those early days was a red interlocking AMC, the abbreviation used until the school changed its name to North Carolina State College for Agriculture and Engineering in 1917.
In the spring of 1918, baseball became the first team to use “N.C. State” on its jerseys, a tradition that was adopted by most other varsity sports other than football, which did not put the name of the school on its jerseys until the 1970s.
Throughout the 1920s, uniforms incorporated either solid-color or geometric designs, such as the bars and triangle used by the 1927 team that won NC State’s only Southern Conference championship.
Beginning in the 1930s, NC State uniforms were some variation of red jerseys and white pants, usually decorated with a stripe around the sleeve or the shoulder pads, a tradition that has pretty much stayed intact, with a few forays into red-on-red or white-on-white jerseys and pants added in.
In the 1970s and early 1980s, jerseys had “Wolfpack” on the back, where other schools often had a players’ last name, and a wolf logo on top of the shoulder pads.
In 1986, new head coach Dick Sheridan completely redesigned the football uniforms and helmets, changing the Block S design that was first introduced in 1918 to a Diamond S that was similar to the design Sheridan had used previously at Furman.
In 2000, shortly after Chuck Amato was hired to replace Sheridan successor Mike O’Cain, the football team went back to the traditional design, with the Block S on helmets and sleeves of the jersey, players’ names on the back and, at times, “NC State” on the front.
In recent years, jerseys have used a small version of the three-wolves-on-a-rock licensed logo just above the number of the front of the jersey.
This is the first year that football will use the single word “State” on the front of its jerseys, though it was the tradition of other sports beginning in 1941 with the baseball team and continuing through 1991. All three of NC State’s Final Four teams (1950, ’74 and ’83) had jerseys with “State” on the front, but that was changed for the 1984-85 season for men’s basketball and gradually phased out for all other sports. The 1991 baseball team was the last to wear regularly “State” on the front of its jerseys.
• By Tim Peeler, tim_peeler@ncsu.edu.