who was the last player not to wear a facemask
Face masks first came into vogue in football during the second half of the 1950s, after the hard-shell plastic helmet became commonplace, and were adopted voluntarily and universally by the NFL within one decade. Garo Yepremian was the last NFL player to not wear a face mask, only adopting one partway through the 1966 season. Single bars were initially the only available design, and this evolved over the course of the next several decades into the current designs, which became the norm at all levels by the early 1980s.