ATLANTA — (Editor's note: A version of this article was first published in 2017 ahead of the Green Bay Packers playing the Atlanta Falcons in the NFC Championship Game. Ahead of the Georgia Bulldogs playing the Alabama Crimson Tide on Monday night for the College Football Playoff National Championship, we are partly republishing it.)
The Georgia Bulldogs are again in the national spotlight Monday night, as they take on the Alabama Crimson Tide in the hopes of securing their first college football national title in more than 40 years.
Any time the Dawgs are in a big national game that draws in the outside of attention of the rest of the country, you inevitably get a lot of people wondering: Hey wait, isn't that the Packers logo?
So which came first?
A Packers team equipment manager under legendary coach Vince Lombardi came up with the team's helmet logo in 1961. He designed the shape of the logo to represent a football and the G to mean Green Bay.
A couple years later in Athens, Georgia, Vince Dooley was redesigning the team's uniforms, including changing the helmets from silver to red, according to the school. His idea was to have a black G on a white background on the helmet. John Donaldson, a newly hired backfield coach, volunteered his wife, Anne, to help with the redesign. Anne had a degree in commercial art from the university, and created the G logo as we know it today, matching Dooley's "forward looking" vision he had for the G.
While the Georgia's G dimensions and colors were different, the university still sought approval from Green Bay to use the logo. The Packers granted it. A year later, Grambling State also designed a G logo for its helmet, and the Packers also granted the school permission.
Georgia's G designed in 1963 is slightly slimmer compared to the Packers' G. It has remained the same since, while Green Bay's logo was slightly altered to have a gold border in 1980.
So no finger pointing, Packers fans. Georgia didn't copy the Green Bay G, and even if they did, Green Bay let them.
