Above: The 100th Anniversary “Duke” football the NFL will be using this season.
The American football. There’s something primal in the feel and smell of the leather, the weight of the ball, and the oddly grippable nature of the strangely shaped, precisely inflated product. Upon picking it up, and perching it in your hand with fingers across the laces, you’re compelled to, at first perhaps, smack it against your other hand several times, internalizing just how solidly-constructed it is. Having savored that moment, continuing to hold it, you’re instantly transformed into a quarterback, as if you want to rear back and fire it into the outstretched arms of imagined wide open receivers. As the NFL celebrates its 100th season, here’s a brief overview of the football’s development into its current form used in the NFL:
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In the 1850’s, in an earlier version of a game that became football, the ball used was an air-filled bladder of a pig, according to Newton’s Football: The Science Behind America’s Game by Allen St. John and Ainissa G. Ramirez.
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In the first college football game on Nov. 6, 1869 between Rutgers University and the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University), a round rubber ball was used.
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Five years later, an oval leather ball, resembling the kind used in rugby, featured in the Harvard-McGill game October 23, 1874 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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The shape of the ball kept getting gradually narrower, becoming what’s officially called a prolate spheroid, after the legalization of the forward pass in 1906.
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After the National Football League was founded, the ball’s dimensions began to be standardized in the 1930s.
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Wilson Sporting Goods Company, based in Chicago, Illinois, has been the official ballmaker for the National Football League (NFL) since 1941.
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Official NFL footballs have been made exclusively at the Wilson factory in Ada, Ohio since 1955.
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Today, each football is handmade from cowhide sourced from Iowa, Kansas, and Nebraska.
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Each cowhide can usually make up to 10 footballs.
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Each football is made up of four pieces and a bladder.
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Footballs are to be 11 to 11¼ inches from tip to tip; 28 to 28½ inches in circumference (around it’s ends), and 21 to 21¼ inches around its middle (the girth) according to the NFL rules.
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The pressure must be 12½ to 13½ pounds per square inch when the rubber bladder is inflated (hear that, Mr. Brady?), and they must weigh 14 to 15 ounces.
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The ball’s pebbly texture comes from a 57,000-pound press that also has tiny Wilson W’s in the design to make it easier to catch.
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Each ball contains Wilson’s logo, a panel with the NFL shield, Commissioner Roger Goodell’s signature, eight white laces and the longtime nickname for the ball, “The Duke,” which was also the nickname of former New York Giants owner Wellington Mara.
Through the development of the game we know as football, through trial and error and happenstance, the current NFL football seems proven and perfected.
