College Football Helmet Study

I'll be covering a few different things here.

Colleges Using Professional Designs

Colleges and high schools use professional helmet designs often, and usually without repercussions. This is mainly for two reasons: the first is that these schools are typically community colleges where football isn't an identity builder. I live in Southern California, and college football down here is USC first, then UCLA. Nobody really identifies their college football identity down here with Cerritos College, a local community college in Cerritos, a town on the border of the counties of LA and Orange. USC and UCLA have easily identifiable helmets and logos, things that they can sell. That's the second reason from above: selling the image for money. Here's Cerritos College's helmet:

This is the old Atlanta Falcons logo. They've moved on to a sleeker, italicized version. This, along with the Eagles wings, Rams horns, and even Vikings horns (as we'll see in a moment) are used with great regularity at the high school and community college level. Basically, this isn't bizarre.

These next few are helmets that use a little more specific and singular logos from the NFL. I think these all may have been changed since they used them, but it's still pretty cool to see them.

The first is from Kentucky State:

They're using the Denver Broncos current horse-head in gold/yellow over green. Yikes.

Next is a close-to-me Orange Coast College, who may have abandoned football altogether (I'll have to get back to you on that):

They use the Tampa Bay Buccaneers flag logo. I do like the use of the navy instead of whatever color the pro team uses as their field--gray, right?

Next is tiny Lewis and Clark from Washing State:

They're using the Patriots guy over orange. Okay...they've since changed the helmet, and then I think they abandoned the football program (not so sure...).

Local Long Beach Gear

This next team uses the Vikings horns, but that's not too out of the ordinary. This team plays Cerritos, which itself is pretty much local for us here in Long Beach. They use a black field instead of Minnesota's purple, Long Beach City College:

Now, we do have a state university here, Long Beach State (CSULB), but they abandoned football in the '90s. Two of their helmets are visible here. The first shows when they still used brown and gold as their color scheme, before switching to black and gold:

Here's another with the brown and gold, but here they're using the team's nickname, the 49ers. Oddly enough, their named not for the gold-miners of the 1849 gold rush, but for the 1949 founding year of the university. Seriously.

Now, that word font and logo is still used by the track team and the volleyball teams, while the newer "the Beach" and the interlocking "LB" are preferred by the higher profile basketball teams. 

To round out a decidedly non-local but mostly relevant discussion, here's a gold helmet with "49ers" on it that does have to do with the gold rush, just not the NFL:

That's the Yuba City College 49ers for you.

1979 Cursive Interstate Rivals

This may seem like a contrived category, but it started when I remembered that Pitt used to use a script writing as their logo, back when Dan Marino went there. Then I noticed that a few other changes had been made, and 1979 seems like a year when these four teams used these four logos. Also, 1979 was the year I was born, which has its own significance for me.

The first is for the state of Pennsylvania, and the rivals are Pitt:

And Pennsylvania University:

The two main Pennsylvania cities are Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, but as far as four letter abbreviations for their main universities? Pitt and Penn. I guess, in reality, that would be Pitt and Penn St, which is a different school from Penn and has had far more success on the football field than Penn. It just doesn't work for this post.

Next state is California, and here we get  the NorCal and SoCal rivalry with UCLA:

And Cal Berkeley:

Today the script UCLA is thicker, and the color scheme for Cal has flip-flopped, but they're otherwise pretty similar. How many schools have done what UCLA has with their logo, the upper-to-lower casing of their normally all upper-case letters? I haven't seen and "Unlv" or "Utep" word mark logos out there.

Panther Studies

I posted a while back about the Carolina Panthers, and how I found a graphic that compared their first and second (very new) logos. I mentioned the USFL Panthers logo as maybe being an inspiration.

Then, later, I found the following Sacramento City College helmet, and had a flashback:

Luckily, my source site had both, and I was able to go back and find the USFL Panthers and compared the two (just for you, my fine readers):

The Awesome and Not-So-Much from the Nerd Colleges

Firs, the Awesome. Below is a local college type city, Claremont, CA. In Claremont are what are known as "the Claremont Colleges". Among others are Scripps, Pitzer, Claremont Mckenna, and my favorite of the bunch, Harvey Mudd.

Harvey Mudd is one of America's top two in Math. It's usually ahead of MIT and behind CalTech. Go Harvey Mudd!

I think they may have stopped playing football, but, again, I'm not sure. What I am sure of, though, is that I haven't seen a helmet idea as cool as this: buck antlers:

And here's MIT's erstwhile football team, the owls or the engineers or something else:

How Many French Were in Kansas?

The following helmet is for Saint Mary of the Plains, a small school in Kansas, and the use of the fleur de lis leads me to believe that there was a French flavor to the founders:

I thought it looked pretty cool, but I like the use of the fleur de lis.

Finally, My Alma Mater

Cal Poly SLO, baby! Go Ramses Barden! Go Asa Jackson, I'll be rooting for you a little in the Super Bowl!