History of the football helmet gridiron until 1939 and were not made mandatory in the National Football League until 1943 As a side note, "the last NFL player to play in a game without a helmet was Dick Plasman an end for the Chicago Bears in 1940." There is a photograph of him without one taken during the 1940 NFL Championship Game in which Chicago defeated the Washington Redskins 73–0. Before the invention of the football helmet, players would often grow their hair long, because they believed it would protect their heads. The man largely credited with inventing the first helmet was George Barclay. In
1967 NFL Championship Game employed in their sweep. Although the Packers and the Chicago Bears were arch-rivals, Lombardi's most passionate game planning was in preparing for Landry's "Flex". Saturday, on the eve of the game, NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle called Jim Kensil and Don Weiss, the executive directors of the NFL, for an update on the weather conditions. It is suspected that they informed him that Sunday's game time temperature of about 5° was playable. Rozelle, who in June 1966 had seen to it that the AFL-NFL Championship game would always be in a warm weather city, inquired if the game could be postponed