Mr. Wizard's World

As many of you are aware, at Uni Watch there has been an on-going debate about the color of the horse on the helmet the Denver Broncos wore for the first part of 1962. The accepted fact by many is that the horse must have been brown, while others believe it is possible that it could have been blue. What is certain is that no one has absolutely proven that it was one color or the other. On Saturday at Uni Watch, Rick Pearson (Ricko) described an alternate theory that would account for how the horse could have been both blue and brown. Today, The Gridiron Uniform Database's own Bill Schaefer brings us his take on the matter:

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(Editor's note: please play video above as you begin to read this)    I've been thinking about Ricko's column in Uni Watch on Saturday - especially since I worked for two hours today on redoing some Broncos stuff thanks to 'anyonebutdetroit.'    So I put together a little demonstration.    I used an orange Sharpie, a royal blue Sharpie, white paper, and a sandwich bag.    I got to thinking about Ricko's idea. I used to put together models when I was a kid, too. The decals were made on clear adhesive (so you wouldn't see anything but the emblem or whatever).    In the first picture I colored an orange blob representing a Broncos orange helmet. I then colored a similar blue blob on the sandwich bag representing the clear decal material. As I slide the blue over the orange, look what happens...instant purplish brown.    It's my belief that Ricko was mostly right. While spending the money on the rest of the uniforms, the Broncos kinda chintzed out on cheaper decals - clear ones. They had every intention of them being blue. But due to the transparent nature of the decal's clear adhesive material, the orange showed through and made the blue appear brownish. What is it about the most likely explanation is usually the right one? Occam's Razor or something?

     Well there it is, another voice in the debate about the Broncos' 1962 helmet. In the database we have the horse depicted as brown, as that is the accepted conventional belief, however if any of the theories proving that it was blue, or sorta blue and brown, or sorta purplish-brown or anything different, are proven to be fact, then we'll update the database accordingly.

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    On behalf of the three of us at The Gridiron Uniform Database, I want to thank everyone who visited our site yesterday.  We feel this website will be an informative and useful research tool for anyone interested in football uniform history.  However, we did not expect the magnitude of congratulations, appreciation and all around good words that we received yesterday.  Nor did we expect the magnitude of numbers that we got after being mentioned on Uni Watch.  Over 5,000 hits and over 30,000 page views (individual views of each page and image on our site), over twenty new twitter followers.  We want to really thank Phil Hecken and Paul Lukas and everybody at Uni Watch for both building the community that made it possible for us to bring our talents together and build this database, as well as for promoting our launch so well yesterday.  Our only hope with this website is to continue to make it as accurate and complete as possible, so that it will continue to be worthy of the praise and appreciation that we have received.

     That is not to say there weren't a few glitches yesterday.  We are dealing with one issue that apparently some overseas visitors are not able to load up our images.  We are currently hosting them on imageshack, and while that was a cost cutting measure, we have found their occasional unreliability to be less than adequate, and in addition we didn't like having a third-party control our images -- what if they decided to block our visitors, or changed their policy on remote hosting?  We just felt it would be better in the long run to host our images on our own server.  On the plus side, they may load even quicker and it will be easier to update the database.  So for the next day or two we will be migrating the images and updating links, but as a vistor to the website, you shouldn't notice any difference.

     Another issue that some of you may have noticed when trying to signup for our forum, the captcha graphic for the confirmation code wasn't working properly.  We have disabled that for the time being and if you were unable to sign up for the forum yesterday, if you'll try again, you should be able to now.

     To those of you who submitted corrections and additions to the database yesterday, the amount of those that we received was frankly overwhelming, and with everything going on, we are unable to announce any database updates today.  Rest assured that we have all of them, whether in the forums or by email - from the 2009 Raiders' throwback numeral change submitted by The Jeff as we opened for business yesterday, the Browns' grey facemask for 2006 and 2007, as well as major Broncos and Giants submissions, and we will continue to go through all of them, and begin tomorrow announcing some further database changes and updates.

     Our preferred method of submitting changes is the forum, it is the easiest way to look at submissions, and others can comment and give feedback.  When posting images in the forum please use [IMG] and [/IMG] tags around your URL to make the image display properly.  E-mails are fine too, but it's easier to lose track of an email, a thread in the forum isn't going anywhere.  Again, thanks for all the support, and keep those database submissions and corrections coming!

     One other minor change, in order to help the website load quicker for those with slower internet connections, we have limited the front page to only showing the two most recent blog articles. Rest assured the archives are all still there, you just have to click 'older entries' or the blog navigation down at the bottom to get there. This way if you just want to get to the database, you don't have to wait for a week to ten days' worth of blog articles to load up.