Washington State University Digital Football Films
The items in this collection are housed in Washington State University’s Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections, located in the Terrell Library.
View the guide to the physical WSU Football Films & Videos, 1916-.
Football Films Collection
The University Archives at WSU Libraries’ Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections (MASC) hold films covering close to 800 WSU football games dating from the 1916 Rose Bowl to present day. While a small portion of these are copyrighted televised games, the vast majority are silent coaching films, usually black-and-white, and even occasionally cut into a non-consecutive order more useful to coaching staff: all the offensive plays, followed by all the defensive plays, followed by all the special teams plays. As these films were produced by Washington State, MASC is able to reproduce these for public use, in the interest of both preserving them for historical posterity and sharing them with Cougar fans as well as football aficionados and fans of the other teams shown here. Due to the time and money involved in digitizing these, relatively few had been digitized prior to 2011. In 2012-2015, funding from the J.L. Stubblefield Trust allowed for digitization, description, and electronic preservation of the majority of the films found here.
Related Materials
For a listing of what films MASC physically holds, please see our chronological football films listing.
A digital collection of WSU historical football programs also exists through the MASC.
Our Apple Cup Timeline provides easy access to films, programs, and news coverage of the UW-WSU rivalry game.
For WSU/Idaho games beyond our set, see UI’s digital football films collection (click on the teams tab and look for Washington St.).
Creating the Films
The majority of these films were created by the WSU/WSC Athletic Department as 16 mm film (some of the more recent ones are VHS), and were eventually given to the University Archives for permanent storage and preservation. Using an Elmo TRV-16G projector and Adobe Premiere Elements 7 / 9 software, these 16 mm. films were digitized and saved as mpeg2 files which were then placed in a permanent storage facility in MASC. These mpeg2 files were then in turn branded and uploaded to YouTube for public access.
Encoding and storage procedures were initially developed by University Archivist Mark O’English, Alex Merrill of WSU Libraries’ Systems, and Jeff Kuure of MASC. Digitization and file conversions were conducted by Kerry Clark, Jim Kernan, Alex Merrill, Shawn Willoughby, and Tim Mace. This page was created by Mark O’English.