Saturday Michigan players will wear a special ’87’ decal on their helmets in honor of the great athlete Ron Kramer who passed away last week. Here’s what it will look like on the winged headgear (HT: U-M Media Relations): Not every Michigan football great got the opportunity to wear a jersey number, including but not limited to Willie Heston, Germany Schulz, and Neil Snow. 1930 was the first year uniform numbers showed up in a Michigan team photo, but we know digits were worn on the gridiron sweaters starting in 1915. Trolling through the 1910 Michigan Daily archives, I found a brief discussion on whether Yost’s men should don digits on their numberless backs. Apparently eastern teams wore numbers and there was a legitimate question of whether Michigan should join them. Yost saw it as a counter to the team concept, telling the Daily, “..it brings the individuals into too much prominence. The team is a machine and should be considered as such and not their individual efforts.” Baseball captain Norman Hill comments echoed Yost’s sentiments but he also noted, “It looks queer to me.” (It’s unknown if the Daily reporter told Hill, “No, you are.”) Here’s the entire piece from the front page of the Tuesday, October 11, 1910 edition of the Michigan Daily:
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Pioneering Play-by-Play (1903)
A very cool post from the excellent UniWatch blog that leads with a photo of fans gathered in the streets of New York watching the 1911 World Series play out via the Playograph, essentially a former-day version of the ESPN Gamecast. Play-by-play game updates were wired in and represented on the board for fans to enjoy (and apparently everyone was required to wear a hat): As Paul of Uni-blog notes, Michigan was a pioneer in bringing the road game experience to fans back home. According to the wonderful U-M Bentley Library, the Michigan Daily posted score updates during the early days of the Fielding Yost Point-A-Minute era, but then stepped things up prior to the 1903 game against the Gophers in Minneapolis: In 1903, a UM student, the Athletic Association and the Bell Telephone Company teamed up to bring Wolverine fans in Ann Arbor a nearly “live” account of the Minnesota game played on October 31 in Minneapolis; a game that would determine the “Champion of the West.” Reporting the game from a specially built tower at Northrop Field, Floyd (Jack) Mattice, Law 1905, could lay a justifiable claim to being one of the first broadcasters of a college football game. Here’s how he did it: In Minneapolis, Bell engineers erected a wooden tower 40 feet high at the 55-yard…
