Ravens and Steelers Face Off in Rare Wednesday NFL Game

Gehrke hated the plain brown leather helmets of the era, so he painted one blue and added the team’s now-familiar yellow horns. The Rams’ owner, Dan Reeves, liked the design and Gehrke spent the summer decorating 75 helmets for use in the 1948 season, collecting a $1 fee for each helmet he painted.

Gehrke would eventually become general manager of the Denver Broncos, but he was well aware of where he made his mark.

“I spent the better part of my life in football, and I’ll be best remembered for some work I did with a paintbrush, but that’s OK,” Gehrke told Sports Illustrated in 1994. “I’ve been called the da Vinci of football helmets, and that’s not all bad.”

1929: The N.F.L.’s First Night Game

Helmet design is not the only football innovation to make its debut on a Wednesday, as the N.F.L. also played its first night game on a Wednesday, way back in 1929.

In the early days of the league, the Providence Steam Roller played their home games at the Cycledrome, a bicycle racing stadium in Rhode Island. A game against the Chicago Cardinals was unplayable because of heavy rains, but in a chaotic financial environment brought about by the recent stock market crash, the team’s players were unwilling to skip a week of pay. So the Steam Roller brass arranged a makeup game for Wednesday, Nov. 6, at Kinsley Park, a minor-league baseball stadium that had recently installed lights.

The Providence Journal recorded a crowd of 6,000 for the game in which the ball was painted white, giving it “the appearance of a large egg” in hopes that players would see it better. The matchup, part of a stretch of four games in six days for Providence, resulted in a 16-0 loss for the Steam Roller, but it was a financial success.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/01/sports/football/steelers-ravens-nfl-wednesday.html