Tempe, Arizona. When Arizona Cardinals quarterback Keeler Murray first saw the trend of custom thigh pads scattered across the NFL, he wasn’t interested in being another player to make a fashion statement.
He was a traditionalist of sorts, favoring the regular, regular, nondescript thigh pads that are a standard part of football uniforms and became required by the NFL in 2013.
Then something changed in Murray.
“I decided to give it a chance,” Murray said.
He reached out to Brian Gudalis—the owner of treDCAL, the company that makes custom thigh pads—through Instagram and asked if he could get a pair. They talked through a few ideas and settled on three: #1, Murray’s personal motto “KM” and Bruce Lee’s face. Producing the first two wouldn’t be a problem, but Godalis knew a picture of me would be hard to pull off. Godales said complex images like this don’t always show up clearly enough through soccer shorts, but he tried anyway. It worked. An image of Lee can be clearly seen through the Cardinals’ white shorts, giving Murray some of the most striking thighs in a league filled with them.
“I think it’s a psychedelic idea,” Murray said. “You look around the league, everyone has different designs, whether it’s their own designs or something else. I think it’s pretty cool.”
Murray is one of the 360 players currently around the NFL to wear Godales thigh pads, joining the likes of Galen Ramsey, Terek Hill, Saquon Barkley, Mike Evans, Ja Mar Chase, Mica Parsons, Justin Reed, Nick Bosa and Jalen Waddell, Godalis said. Justin Jefferson and Davante Adams. There is no problem in the NFL with players wearing custom thigh pads, according to a league spokesperson.
Godales said more than 600 players have worn them since 2017, including half the players at Super Bowl LV and 38 players at Super Bowl LIV. They are gaining popularity. New England Patriots defensive line coach DeMarcus Covington bought pairs for all of his men.
At least nine college football teams have purchased pads for their entire teams — Tennessee, Florida State, Boston State, Pennsylvania College, Ole Miss, Michigan State, Michigan and Boise Kentucky — and have been worn by dozens of individual players, Godalis said. . Worn by at least 25 players in Oklahoma.
They have become a way for players to share their brand as much as they have become a fashion statement.
“When you took a picture, people were looking straight at your pads,” said Tennessee quarterback Bud Dupree, who was the first player to wear thigh pads when he was at the University of Kentucky. “I still get pictures on Instagram when I had my pads on. I can pull them off and still have Instagram pictures with my pillowcases, and it was such a strong feeling, man.”
Numbers, team crests and personal crests appear weekly under soccer jerseys. Each team’s logo is slightly different from the official logo so as not to infringe on trademarks and copyrights. But the logos are also close enough to make it difficult to identify them.
DMs Gudalis is full of requests from NFL and college players asking for a pair. Some want them for free, but most offer to pay. Those who want a complementing pair are usually college gamers who try the old, “Do you know who I’m playing?” Line in but don’t realize that treDCAL has a client list full of NFL players with hundreds of thousands of followers or, in Murray’s case and a select few, millions. Despite this, Godalis realizes that he runs a business, and any show helps him. If an NFL player with 1.5 million or 2 million followers inquires about, say, a pair of pads, they usually get them for free.
“Keller, though, does reach out and he’s as gentle as can be,” said Godales. “I mean, just respectful, and polite, and he probably didn’t know at the time that I was old enough to be his dad. And by the way, I’m 48. He probably didn’t realize it but because these guys are, you know, I can tell by the way they talk It’s with me that they don’t know how old I am. I can tell, but Kyler was great.”
The hardest part about designing Murray’s Lee was designing the martial arts master in such a way that he was recognizable by the pants. To do this, Godalis taught himself AutoCAD.
A full custom pair ranges from $27 to $75, a numbers-only pair ranges from $35 to $40 and a pair with a crossover of $27.
TreDCAL became profitable in July after launching in 2013. It has become a niche item in the sports equipment world, but that hasn’t stopped the TV show “Shark Tank” from asking for a video submission. Gudalis doesn’t think his thigh pads are a “Shark Tank” product, but he’s “always fun when that happens.”
And it all came to Godales while playing middle school football in the late ’90s. He was an elementary school sports teacher and an after school coach. During one of the exercises, he wondered to himself why most thigh pads have three edges instead of flat, when they could have a number on them. She held the idea, but Godalis pitched it away for later.
Fast-forward to nearly 15 years, it’s 2013 and he’s a Lexington, Kentucky, attorney working billing hours, stepping away from litigation and civil defense cases. He was sitting in his office one night when the idea for custom thigh pads resurfaced. He went to Michael’s house and bought a knife and some foam, then he started cutting pictures. The first was football. He put it under his son’s baseball pants – because he didn’t play football.
“She showed up,” said Godalis. “Football popped up in there and I thought, ‘Well, I’m thinking of something.'”
Since then, he and his wife have sat in their kitchen until three or four in the morning every day, slicing foam.
A photo of that first made its way to the University of Kentucky, who liked Godales’ idea.
Dupre, who was big at the time, ended up being the first player to ever wear one, but at the time, it wasn’t a complete thigh pad. They were just stickers that were stuck to the existing pads. On one leg was the number “2”, and on the other was the “UK” emblem. Every few weeks, Gudalis would send out new badges to Dupree because they were getting beaten up during training and matches.
“At the time, those little pads just made me excited just to put my pants on so other guys could see,” Dupree said. “It started with that, man. A lot of guys were like, ‘Where do you get these pads from?'” “
Equipment managers in Kentucky were skeptical of the pads at first, but once Dupree started wearing them, they were pretty good with it.
However, Godalis had no idea if they would hunt. Then two weeks later, the state of Michigan filed an application. Then Pennsylvania. Then Ole Miss and by the end of the first year, nine schools had equipped their teams with Gudalis platforms.
“That’s exciting to me,” Dupree said. “I’d be able to tell my kids, ‘Man, do you see the company here?'” I was the first person to wear it. I am passionate about him, his company and his family. “
By 2019, Gudalis was repeating the standard thigh pad that had been in football forever, and his business began to grow. Over the past nine years, treDCAL has occupied a large part of Cape Gudalis. He still practices law, and his family, who started helping him make pads and stickers in 2013, still helps him.
“You see this stuff on Sundays, you probably made them sit in front of the TV at home in my living room, where my wife and I watch our TV shows — ‘The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills’ or something like that,” Godalis said. with it.”
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