Sock it to me...

[darkhaha]

We were discussing socks over on the Falcons thread, so I thought I'd start a new topic. For those of you who haven't been reading that thread, here's the gist of it:

Wow! As I suspected, this design works extremely well even with today's truncated sleeves. One small nitpick ('cause that's what geeks are all about): The complete striping pattern on the original socks was actually white-black-thick red-black-white. Back in those days, players wore baseball-type stirrups with white socks over them, and the striping pattern that would appear was dependent on how high they pulled up their white socks. Most likely the designer of the throwbacks just saw a pic like the one shown above of the road set and concluded that the pattern was just white-black-thick red. With many if not most of today's players wearing the white part of their now one=pierce socks quite low, there is certainly plenty of room to have the complete and correct pattern. All in all, these throwbacks look fantastic, though...

While I'm pontificating on socks... I've always found the evolution of NFL sock design kind of interesting. As I said above, back in the day the striping pattern on any player depended on how high he pulled up his whites. Sometime around the late 60s or 70s, the trend was for players to pull the whites up so high they obscured almost all of the colored sock underneath. This fad continued for quite awhile and led, I believe, to many frustrated designers simply giving up using stripes and just going with solid color socks. Of course, it seems that today's players don't like the stripes anyway and would prefer to have just one solid color -- a look which i find quite hideous. Probably because I'm old and living in the past...

I'm glad you posted this because I had that problem when doing a uniform history for the Saints. Another lil' fact is that players used athletic tape which was white in those days, around the top of their calf to keep their socks from falling down. Many people don't realize that some teams never had this mysterious white stripe incorporated into their design, just a tactic used by the players.

If you're still with me after wading through all that, here's an example of what BigDub was talking about in terms of using tape to keep the socks up:

I always liked how that looked with the mid-60s Broncos set, as the white tape sort of mimicked the white stripes on the sleeve insert.

Here's a pic from 1960; they don't seem to be doing the white tape thing yet:

Most teams wore plain white socks over the colored stirrups, but at some point in the early to mid-60s, the Boston Patriots started wearing crew socks with a blue and red stripe over their already amply striped stirrups (and see if you can say that three times in a row):

(As an aside, this is my favorite Oilers uniform)

Around '67 or '68, the Pats went to even bigger stripes on the stirrups; this combo of white tape, huge stripes on the stirrups and crew socks with even more stripes might even make Paul Lukas wince a little:

In 1969, the Saints followed suit, creating their striping pattern on the tube sock worn over the stirrup:

[oldschoolvikings]

This thread makes me so happy...