Why do NFL Quarterbacks say Blue 42? The answer is almost as old as football itself

The quarterback Tyler Bray faced a steep learning curve when he moved to the Kansas City Chiefs in 2013. As a unused Free Agent, he had to memorize a thick game book, master the use of a new crime and acclimatize the speed of the professionals.

He also had to find a “cadence” the combination of color and number that bark quarters back in front of the ball, such as Blue 42 or Red 80. Bray had a no-huddle crime at the university of Tennessee, which meant that the snapshot was based on a physical note such as clapping or legs. And although he had not yet used a verbal cadence, it didn't seem to be a big deal.

But when he tried White 80 in practice, the head coach of Chiefs Andy Reid asked him to switch it off.

“You keep your 'white' too long,” said Reid to Bray. “Choose a different color.”

Bray tried green, but that didn't feel right either. “And so for the rest of my career,” says Bray, “it was always blue 80.”

In modern NFL, where microphones cover the field, there are only a few audible things than the quarterback frequency. Before every game, Patrick Mahomes gries Blue 80 (or sometimes knows 80). Tom Brady roared Green 18th Brett Favre screamed Blue 58. Aaron Rodgers also when he didn't say Green 19. Hollywood followed the example. In “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective” Jim Carrey went with Blue 42.

Sometimes the color number combination means something. Sometimes it is nothing more than a rhythmic way of initiating a piece.

“This is something that quarterbacks never want to give up,” says former NFL QB Matt Hasselbeck. “Because the secret is really important.”

However, there is a constant: Most NFL quarters have no idea where or why or how it started.

“I don't know who started it at all,” said Seahawks Quarterback Geno Smith.

“I hope you didn't expect me to know,” said Drew Lock's giant.

“It was so forever, honestly,” said the quarterback from Vikings, Sam Darnold. “I don't know why.”

However, there is an absolutely reasonable explanation for why cadres of the color number exist, and the history includes the development of football.

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In autumn 1890, 3,000 people gathered in the Sportsman's Park in St. Louis to observe how the University of Missouri played Washington University of St. Louis. It was the first football game in the history of Mizzou, and according to Columbia Missourian, the afternoon was shaped by a clear and cold prediction, the clip of Cowbells, the tooting of tin horns and locals that were involved in the game via farm cars, phaetons and surreys.

In the first series, the Washington University quarterback began a number of numbers – “31, 49, 87, 12” – to communicate plays. Mizzou's team frozen and looked at the referee. The game stopped. The officials awarded.

Was the screams of such numbers legal at all?

It turned out that it was, but it was a new part of the sport that Missouris could be awarded players for their ignorance.

Just eight years earlier, in 1882, a group of players from Yales football team met in the Duplex of the Walter Camp to speak strategy. At that time, football was a chaotic, random chaos, more rugby than modern football, a crazy scrum in a cloud of dust. In 1882 Camp proposed the five-yard rule, after which the teams had to win five meters at three depths to keep their own. With the addition of the five-yard rule, lines came on the field that give the sport and shape.

Camp and Yale players believed that the new rule would make coordination and strategy essential, and met in the camp of the camp to talk about it. On this day, Camp, often referred to as the father of American football, wrote five signals – as the first to have ever been recorded. Each signal consisted of a phrase. A signal, “Play Sharp, Charlie”, meant that Yale -Quarterback Henry Twombly would receive the snapshot and end the ball for a secondary run.

“Camp had to invent games and create signals,” said Twombly later. “He was in a completely new area. There were no T formations, single or double wings. There was no coach and no football player who knew something about this new, mysterious game. “

In 1889, Amos Alonzo Stagg, a player for the camp in Yale and later a legendary coach himself, claimed, for the first time in the history of football, Yale switched to numerical signals (there are some disputes about it. The historian Alexander Weyand has attributed the pennsylvania Military College with the creation of a numerical signal system in 1887. 1890s the signals became numerical, and it was common for quarterback to initiate a piece by chalking out numbers.

When the defense caught up, however, the signal system became more complicated. The coaches called their half -backs and holes according to the number and offered a code for ongoing games. And with the invention of the Huddle, the teams began to rely on “automatic” or audio to change the games in the series of scrimmage. The strategy began mathematics: a quarterback could call Play 28 in the Huddle and then change it by adding “Three” or “Subtract seven” in the line.

“Football threatened to become an advanced course in mental arithmetics,” said StAgg later.

Then a young coach came with a law studies and a new way of thinking.

Terry Brennan was an unlikely coaching visionary. An all-American half-back at Notre Dame at the end of the 1940s, Brennan studied in philosophy before he had a degree in law studies in Depaul. When he competed with Notre Dame in 1954, his only experience of the head coach came to a high school in Chicago.

He was only 25 years old.

In the 1950s, Brennan visited a coaching clinic under the direction of Oklahomas coach Bud Wilkinson, who had transformed the Sooners into a power pack. Wilkinson's famous Split -T -Offensive was based on the numerical signal system, and while Brennan Wilkinson and his success admired, he thought there could be a better way.

“You can teach every football system and follow the letter,” he said once, “but I don't think I follow him out of the window.”

Brennan believed that the games were lost by mistakes, so he wanted to simplify the game as far as possible. He got the addition and subtraction distracted Linemen and created paths for errors. To solve the problem, Brennan developed the so -called “Live Color” system.

Every game in Notre Dame's Huddle was preceded by a color. When the quarterback red 28 said in the Huddle, it meant that “red” was the living color. If he called a different color than red on the line, it was a dummy call. But when he screamed 17, his teammates knew that the piece had been changed from 28 to 17.

The color number system spread like fire, and although it is difficult to definitely say that Brennan was the inventor, he was at least one of the early pioneers. It quickly spread over the college football and dripped into the professional rows. When Paul Brown trained the Cincinnati Bengals, the team always used the same live color: Brown. When Hasselbeck's father Don played a close end for the New York Giants, Bill Parcell's Black preferred.

In a relatively short time, quarterbacks that call a color number combination on the line were the norm. Decades later, the color number still has meaning, but not in the way Terry Brennan intended.

When Matt Hasselbeck became the backup of the Green Bay Packers at the end of the 1990s, the team of coaches commissioned him a cadence: whatever Brett Favre said.

It was not just the words – in this case, Favre's trademark Green 58, what Favre said he decided because he liked the river – but also the rhythm and sounded. When Hasselback played, the coaches told him that the other players needed his cadence to be consistent. Hasselbeck listened to Favre and tried to replicate, but a day quarters coach Mike McCarthy went on a day -quarters backer.

“He says: 'You have to go home and literally practice with a teammate or in the mirror,” recalled Hasselbeck, exactly what he did.

Nowadays the cadence can be used to synchronize the movement before the snap, to confuse the defense with a dummy call or to signal a further subtle change. But like filler texts in a pop song, the cadence is usually less substance and more melody. Consider the Cowboys Quarterback DAK Prescott, the Blue 42 for something easier, but still rhythmically avoided: “Here we go!” Or the former Vikings Quarterback Joshua Dobbs, who prepared in 2023 with a quick warm -up in an emergency: he practiced his cadence with the offensive line of his new team on the sidelines.

The biggest key these days are consistency.

“You try to give your offensive line the best jump you can get in a line of defense,” says Bray. “If you have the same rhythm in your cadence every time, the O-line gets used to you and you can jump your count.”

Since the NFL crimes are more dependent on movement, the rhythm has become the thing. The words or color may not play a role, but the pre-snap movement must be right with the syllables, so that the cadence still does.

That is why the former NFL QB coach Rich Scangarello once gave a quarterback every game in the game book, so that at the exact time they needed, he would say to everyone. That is why Lock, like Hasselbeck, was rehearsed in front of a mirror. And that's why Hasselbeck, almost a decade, can still recite exactly how he expressed his cadence.

Quarterbacks may not understand the long history why they constantly bark a color and the number. But the law has become a business card and a catch expression and with a less focus on cadence in college a transitional rite of the professionals.

(Illustration: Demetrius Robinson / The athlete; Photos: Maddie Meyer, David Eulitt Cooper Neill, Jonathan Daniel, Will Newton / Getty Images)