This was the first Popeye cartoon in which he doesn't eat spinach. (Olive eats it instead.)
The Y on the football sweater stands for Yale University. At the time, its football team was a collegiate powerhouse.
Sports were becoming more mainstream in the 1930s, thanks, in part, to their being broadcast on radio and shown in cinema newsreels.
One of a number of Popeye shorts sent to Asia in the 1980s to undergo a redraw and colorization process.