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Illinois Football Unveils Throwback Helmets for Saturday’s Game vs. Purdue

As you may be aware, Illinois football is in the midst of a season-long celebration of the 100th Anniversary of Memorial Stadium, and their uniforms and helmets have been celebrating previous eras of Illini football. The team has already showed off some retro helmets, wearing their white underlined ILLINOIS buckets twice (worn from 2005-12), and their radially arched “ILLINI” (worn from 1980-82) with blue letters outlined in white, earlier this season.

Saturday’s matchup against the Boilermakers will see a third retro helmet, nicknamed “Four Star,” which was worn during Dick Butkus’ years at Illinois, when the Fighting Illini wore versions of the four-star helmets from 1962-68. Players’ numbers were featured under the four stars, and the helmet donned a gray facemask with white-blue-white center stripes.

Here’s a video showing the stripes, stars and numbers being applied to the orange helmet:

A quick note about the video: I always love seeing Equipment Managers applying facemasks and decals to helmets. When I was a youngster, I never realized how helmets were “created”; for some reason (and probably going on into my early teens), I always thought helmets came completely “finished” right from the factory. In my mind, if a team had two orange helmets with different designs or facemask colors, I always assumed they were two completely different buckets, not the same shell but with different decals and detailing.

Although this specific helmet is a throwback to the Butkus era, the team did wear it as a throwback once before, in 2008. The original helmet featured much larger blue stars than either the 2008 throwback or the helmet to be worn against Purdue this Saturday.

And the parade of “new” throwback helmets isn’t done. Aside from the two already worn and the Four Star, the Illini will wear a faux-leather helmet and throwback uniform next weekend, when the team hosts Michigan during the Stadium Rededication game.

The team has been wearing the throwback helmets during practice this week. Here are a couple looks at what we’ll see on Saturday:

I rather like this particular throwback helmet, although I wish they had used larger blue stars, as were seen on the Butkus era lids.

It’s been fun seeing the Illini bring back some helmets of different eras this season. I’m looking forward to seeing these on the field Saturday. But I’ll really be excited for the Red Grange helmets and uniforms next weekend.

Your thoughts?

 
  
 
Comments (13)

    This looks great. I suspect the stars are smaller to fit the variety of new helmets with all the vents, etc, better.

    Don’t know why, but helmets without the bumper logo really bother me. Probably just cause there’s always been something there. Grey face mask look ugly to me too.

    Speaking of, is there a reason all the facemask were grey back in the day?

    Facemasks were grey because it’s a neutral color that someone thought would be easier for a player to look past – become psychologically invisible. I think that person might have been Paul Brown but it also could have been someone at Riddell. This was in the era when players had started out without facemasks; when the clear plexiglass facemasks proved too brittle they went with grey.

    So, we’re seeing lots of these new helmet designs that have shrunk the main decals to accommodate the vents on the new helmet models. Do these vents really *do* anything? I mean, obviously they vent to keep the player’s head cooler, but do they need to be shaped as they are and placed where they are? Do they contribute at all to the safety of the helmet? Is it a significant weight reduction?

    Obviously, the safety function of the equipment should take priority over the decals, but I suspect that these big triangular vents are themselves more of an aesthetic element to show off how hi-tech and “futuristic” the next-gen helmet is. If that’s true, then the decal shrinkage we’re seeing exists to accommodate the aesthetic elements of the helmet model, rather than the safety elements.

    No football helmet of any kind had vents apart from the earholes until the 1990s. I guess player complaints led to this innovation, but the shapes of vents are a result of impact testing.

    So they’ve worn their Giants helmet throwbacks, and their Bengals helmet throwbacks, and now they’re wearing Jim Brown Browns helmet throwbacks.

    The Illini have some good helmet game this season. My favorite so far has been the radially arched logo. I too would like to see bigger stars on this lid but alas.

    What is the origin of the 4 stars? Is it the four branches of the military or something else?

    I am going to guess they will wear these helmets against Northwestern when/if that game is played at Wrigley Field to tie in with the Dick Butkus link.

    I don’t like numbers on the sides of helmets, but I do like the grey face mask with the orange helmet. Of the three throwbacks, I prefer the ILLINOIS version since they did not include the navy outline around the letters. White contrasts with orange well enough that I think the navy outline is superfluous.

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