Were Footballs Ever Really Made of Pigskin?

These days, footballs are typically made from cowhide or vulcanized rubber, making their nickname "pigskins" somewhat ironic. Football fans often perpetuate the idea that footballs used to be made of pigskin, which is how they got their nickname, but it turns out this isn't the case.

In fact, "pigskins" were originally made out of animal bladders—sometimes the bladder of a pig, which is thought to be how the moniker "pigskin" came about. Animal bladders were much more accessible to the average team than more expensive items like leather. When the bladder was inflated, it was mostly round and served well as a ball for gameplay.

The only trouble was actually inflating it, which was a pretty disgusting task as you can probably imagine. Sometimes the bladder would be stuffed with things like straw or scraps of other material, but stuffing rather than inflating tended to lead to a strange shape that didn't work quite as well in certain sports. Later on, the animal bladders were sometimes encased with leather of some type, though pig skin wasn't commonly used.



Since 1955, the official NFL footballs have been made at the Wilson factory in Ada, Ohio. Each football is handmade from cowhide sourced from Kansas, Nebraska, and Iowa. The hides are tanned in Ada with a "top secret football-weather-optimizing tanning recipe." 130 people working at the factory produce nearly 4000 footballs every day. Each football is made up of four pieces and a synthetic bladder, and each cowhide can usually make up to 10 footballs.

Another question often associated with what a football used to be made out of is, "How did American footballs get their shape?" As you probably know, footballs are pointy at the end and rounder in the middle (known as a prolate spheroid). Turns out, this shape wasn't for aerodynamics (the forward pass wasn't introduced until 1906) or ease of holding it on long runs to make a touchdown. Rather, it happened purely by accident. As one witness of the Princeton-Rutgers game in 1869 remembered,


This difficulty with the shape of the inflated ball continued on; by the time the quality of the ball's manufacturing had improved sufficiently to get the shape right, the oblong shape had been the norm for so long it stuck, with only slight tweaks to make it a little more pointy happening over time. The rest, as they say, is history.

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Bonus "Pigskin" Facts:

  • While many people call footballs "pigskins," the official nickname of the football used by the NFL is "The Duke" after Wellington Mara. Mara, who was named after the Duke of Wellington, was the co-owner of the New York Giants and the son of the founder of the Giants. The nickname was used between 1941 and 1969. It fell out of use in 1970 when the AFL and NFL merged, but bounced back into play in 2006, a year after Mara's death.
  • The famous Super Bowl commercials today cost companies around $4 million to air, and that's just for 30 seconds of prime time. That's about $133,333 per second.


This post has been republished with permission from TodayIFoundOut.com.