Pigskin Dispatch

I was recently honored to receive an assignment to freelance write a post for the Pro-Football-Reference website. The Pro Football Reference is a great tool to look up almost anything statistical in professional football you would like. We will chat a bit about my choices and the criteria I used to categorize them for the article.

Here is a line to my post of the Top NFL Cornerbacks of All-TIme.

Join us at the Pigskin Dispatch website and the Sports Jersey Dispatch to see even more Positive football news! Sign up for daily football history headlines in your email inbox @ Email-subscriber.

Miss our football by the day of the year podcasts? Well, don't, because they can still be found at the Pigskin Dispatch website.

More rules revisions are coming to the MLB other than timing clocks being added. Teams need to make some choices on their jerseys and even some adornments. We talk about these and more in this episode.

Come join us at the Sports Jersey Dispatch website or the Pigskin Dispatch website to see even more Positive football and Sports History news! Sign up to get daily football history headlines in your email inbox @ Email-subscriber . 

Bootleg footballs were a part of the game almost 100 years ago. They were balls produced and used in games not authorized by the NCAA. The story of these bogus balls is a fascinating glance back into gridiron history. We are so glad that author and historian Timothy P. Brown has joined us to tell the tale of these pirated pigskins and glimpse at an era in football history gone by and how it changed the rules.

Timothy Brown's FootballArchaeology.com has a daily football factoid that he shares that is quite interesting in a short read. They uniquely preserve football history, and we are quite happy that Tim has agreed to join us each week to review some of his Today's Tidbits. Click that link, and you can subscribe for free to receive them.

Join us at the Pigskin Dispatch website and the Sports Jersey Dispatch to see even more Positive football news! Sign up to get daily football history headlines in your email inbox @ Email-subscriber

Miss our football by the day of the year podcasts, well don't, because they can still be found at the Pigskin Dispatch website.

The title of this series in our Football History Rewind library appropriately ends with the 1930 season. 1930 was the end of an era in football history. Not only was it the final season in the decade of the 1920s, but it was also the final year of a football legend. Knute Rockne, unbeknownst to anyone but the Creator, would coach his final season in 1930, a season considered by many to be his “masterpiece.”

Read our posted article here.

Join us at the Pigskin Dispatch website and the Sports Jersey Dispatch to see even more Positive football news! Sign up to get daily football history headlines in your email inbox @ Email-subscriber

Miss our football by the day of the year podcasts, well don't, because they can still be found at the Pigskin Dispatch website.

One of the biggest football rules about faces of all time may be in the game-time relationship of a coach in communicating with his players.

Timothy Brown's FootballArchaeology.com has a daily football factoid that he shares that is quite interesting in a short read. They preserve football history uniquely, and we are quite happy that Tim has agreed to join us each week to go over some of his Today's Tidbits. Click that link, and you can subscribe for free to receive them.

Join us at the Pigskin Dispatch website and the Sports Jersey Dispatch to see even more Positive football news! Sign up to get daily football history headlines in your email inbox @ Email-subscriber

Miss our football by the day of the year podcasts, well don't, because they can still be found at the Pigskin Dispatch website.

In this episode, we discuss the history and origin of the Atlanta Falcons franchise.

For more on the Falcons, start-up, visit our accompanying story here.

Join us at the Pigskin Dispatch website and the Sports Jersey Dispatch to see even more Positive football news! Sign up to get daily football history headlines in your email inbox @ Email-subscriber

Miss our football by the day of the year podcasts, well don't, because they can still be found at the Pigskin Dispatch website.

There is only one school I am aware of with the nickname of the Hoyas. Georgetown University is unique in that moniker. Who was the George in Georgetown? What is a Hoya? Is it a bulldog, as the logo suggests? These questions are answered and more in this episode.

Come join us at the Sports Jersey Dispatch website or the Pigskin Dispatch website to see even more Positive football and Sports History news! Sign up to get daily football history headlines in your email inbox @ Email-subscriber . 

We smacked the rewind button on the cassette of Gridiron history and stopped at the pro football season of 1929. A year that saw the NFL add an official and gain a new champion. Our year-by-year look at the history of the gridiron, Football History Rewind.

Check out the standings, the all-pro team with player stats, and more at the web page for this episode here.

Join us at the Pigskin Dispatch website and the Sports Jersey Dispatch to see even more Positive football news! Sign up to get daily football history headlines in your email inbox @ Email-subscriber

Miss our football by the day of the year podcasts? Well don't, because they can still be found at the Pigskin Dispatch website.

Unpopular Essays on Sports History is part of the Sports History Network - The Headquarters For Sports Yesteryear.

HIGHLIGHTED SHOW

Unpopular Essays on Sports History

Supposition. We live in a golden age of sports.

I mean this not in the sense of athletes becoming stronger, speedier, savvier and smarter than ever before, nor in terms of the amazing access we have to live streams and stat feeds, instant insights and opinionating, the quirks and personalities of our celebrity heroes.

This, rather, is a golden age of sports in humanistic, historical terms. The truth is that the great majority of people today, willingly or not, have a direct and regular connection to organized and/or participatory sports in their everyday lives than anyone born before the 20th century.

In the United States, not a person alive can recall a time when sports was not a staple of the daily newspaper. For four generations, the notion that nightly news programs should devote up to one-quarter of their airtime to sports is taken for granted. Why do we take this for granted?

At Unpopular Essays on Sports History, everything is questionable.

Supposition: Those who play the games have ascended in the public eye to heights unimaginable in times past. Playing top-level sports can get today’s athlete into business, TV production, national politics – and just how did this happen?

At Unpopular Essays on Sports History, everything is up for examination.

Supposition: Sports – wherever they are played but particularly in these places where they are invented – effect culture, even pace it. One could argue that sports are more important than ever.

Corollary: Sports history, too, should be more important, yet is probably more disrespected and disavowed than ever.

At Unpopular Essays on Sports History, we love the past while marveling at the present, and wondering about the future.  

The “unpopular essays” of the title is a nod to Bertrand Russell, the logical positivist and my favorite philosopher. (Plus it’s a great excuse to get my BA degree to finally pay off.) And as we’re taught in philosophy, It’s not about answering the questions; it’s about making them clearer.

Three days a week, Unpopular Essays on Sports History will examine a moment in sports history, probe some modern ethos of our games, or speculate on what the past can teach the future – and all in 500 words or less – though probably occasionally throwing in the occasional longer interview. We’ll tour the spaces and times of the whole wide world of sports history about as quickly as Secretariat ran the Belmont Stakes.

Supposition: Sports history is fascinating, illuminating and fun. Join me, Os Davis, in making the questions of sports history clearer right here an Unpopular Essays on Sports History, an SHN production. 

Os Davis, host of Unpopular Essays on Sports History 

Os never played the games but has enjoyed a nearly 30-year career in sports writing, reporting, blogging, and podcasting. He has hosted/co-hosted and produced/co-produced podcasts on NFL football, CFL football, European basketball and sports movie review. For the Sports History Network, he currently writes and co-produces the historical fiction audiodrama Orville Mulligan: Sports Writer and will return soon with more episodes of Truly the GOATs (promise).

Learn more about the show on the Sports History Network.

The tradition of wearing the varsity letter, a letterman jacket, or a varsity sweater is one that, in many places, still carries on to this modern day. It is so common in Americana we may take it for granted, but this badge of honor has a long and storied tradition. Our friend Timothy P Brown digs through the archives to find out where and why this exchange started and by whom in this weekly visit by the Football Archaeologist.

Timothy Brown's FootballArchaeology.com has a daily football factoid that he shares that are quite interesting in a short read. They uniquely preserve football history, and we are quite happy that Tim has agreed to join us each week to go over some of his Today's Tidbits. Click that link, and you can subscribe for free to receive them.

Join us at the Pigskin Dispatch website and the Sports Jersey Dispatch to see even more Positive football news! Sign up to get daily football history headlines in your email inbox @ Email-subscriber

Miss our football by the day of the year podcasts, well don't, because they can still be found at the Pigskin Dispatch website.