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Thursday, January 08, 2015

Manning's Many Masks

Archie Manning owns a record unmatched in the history of football, that until now has never been written about or even discussed. No player before or after him wore so many different facemasks. Almost every year Archie would take the field wearing a different facemask. Some were only slightly different from the previous version, but other changes were more profound. As a youngster interested in such things I found the changes fascinating - though I dislike several of his choices. Here are samples of most of the facemasks Archie wore.  
As a sophomore at Ole Miss Archie wore what many college and pro quarterbacks wore: the single bar.
As a junior in 1969 Archie wore 
a somewhat rounded cage.
As a senior in 1970 Archie wore 
the squared off version of the cage.
A great mask worn Archie only wore for a short time.
For all I know this could have been the mask
he wore in his rookie year. 
Later Archie changed to one
of the more popular cages of the era.
Then he changed to a slightly different style.
Later Archie changed to a Dungard mask
similar to the one worn by Terry Bradshaw.
By noting the Rams old uniforms above and new unis below it is easy to determine chronology.
When more and more quarterbacks were ditching the single and double bar masks in favor of the cage, Archie went old school with the single bar. Besides Joe Theisman of the Redskins, Archie was the last NFL quarterback to wear the single bar.
The ugliest mask ever worn by Archie.
Archie models the mask later worn by Kenny Stabler.
The mask above is quite similar to the mask below - though they're not an exact match.
One of the last masks Archie wore in New Orleans was the style he also wore in Houston and Minnesota.
Even these count as different masks, since the Oilers wore red masks and the Vikings white.

1 comment:

  1. There's a new picture of Archie wearing a double re enforced bar NJOP...full linemans cage. Think it's form Getty iamges.

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