The football season in America has recently ended with Super Bowl LVIII that crowned the National Football League’s champion for the season that began in September. The championship game was exciting being won by the Kansas City Chiefs in overtime and viewed by perhaps as many as 120 million people worldwide.  Although injuries do exist, the sport has never been safer in its entire existence than it is today. But there was a time when injuries all too often were crippling or led to the death of the impacted players. It was so bad that there were discussions by college presidents about banning the game completely. At the same time there was one influential friend of the sport who happened to be an avid fan. He used his good offices to help direct the leaders of the sport’s governing bodies to change the rules to make the game safer for the players. His name was Theodore Roosevelt, and he was the 26th President of the United States.
The Invention of American Football: It all began officially on November 6, 1869, when teams from Princeton and Rutgers Universities played the first intercollegiate football game in New Brunswick, New Jersey. This first game was more like soccer as it used rules adapted from the London Football Association. But soccer has a cousin called rugby, and it was this sport that had the greater impact on early football in North America. The technical title of the game was “gridiron football” as the field was laid out with vertical yard lines, as opposed to “association football” which was the game of soccer as we in the U.S. know it. The pioneer of gridiron football was Walter Camp, a student and player for the Yale University team from 1876-1881. Camp was also on the rules board of the new Intercollegiate Football Association (IFA). Under Camp’s influence the IFA changed the rugby scrummage (or scrum) to a scrimmage that put the players on either side of the yard line where the ball sat, and broke up the action into separate plays after the ball carrier was down on the ground. The team on offense then was required to move the football a required number of yards in a certain number of plays (downs) or give it up to the other team. During this late 19th century period, the placement of eleven men on each side of the scrimmage line, the establishment of the quarterback and backfield players, the number of points achieved per score, the methods of scoring, and signal calling by the offensive team all emerged.
The State of the Game in 1900: As it stepped away from rugby, the game grew in popularity, but it also grew in its physical roughness with players sometimes suffering serious or fatal injuries. It morphed into a game of brute strength and toughness as the players pushed, shoved, and knocked each other out of the way in order to move the ball only a few yards down the field. Most players had only minimal equipment for protection. Players playing without helmets were used as battering rams to push the pile forward. The ball carrier might find himself on the ground with nearly all the opposing players crashing on top of him to keep him from advancing the ball. To protect the backfield players on offense the remainder of the offensive players often would lock arms together to form a barrier that kept the defenders out. The result of this was a series of arm, shoulder, and back injuries unlike those from nearly every other sport. In 1894 at the Harvard-Yale game that was referred to as “the bloodbath at Hampton Park,” no fewer than five players from either team were hospitalized with serious injuries. It reached a peak in 1905 when the Chicago Tribune referred to the collegiate football season as the “death harvest,” and the Cincinnati Commercial Tribune displayed a cartoon with a pile of injured football players on the ground and the Grim Reaper on a goalpost getting ready to claim his due. The game had degenerated into what could be called a legalized brawl.
Theodore Roosevelt Seeks Rule Changes: Roosevelt’s interest in improving the game dates back to his days as the New York City Police Commissioner in the 1890’s. He strove to restart the Harvard-Yale rivalry that was cancelled for two years after the bloodbath at Hampton Park. Later as president he spoke favorably of football as being a rough game that helped contribute to a strenuous lifestyle for the players both during college years and afterward. His volunteer Cavalry Unit during the Spanish American War was made up of former football players and nicknamed the “Rough Riders.” In October, 1905, he called a meeting at the White House of the coaches and other representatives of three of the premier college football programs of the times—Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. At his urging the schools issued a statement condemning brutality and excessive violence with a pledge to clean the game up. It was a start, but the violence continued even reaching home as his son, a Harvard freshman and a football player, had his nose broken in a game versus Yale that some believe was the result of a deliberate act. Before the 1906 season, Columbia, Northwestern, and Duke, all discontinued football, and Stanford and California switched over to rugby. Charles William Eliot, Harvard’s president, warned that Harvard might be the next school to drop football, bringing the sport close to what might have been a fatal blow altogether. Roosevelt went back to work lobbying college and university leaders for radical rule changes. Soon the Intercollegiate Athletic Association was formed, with members from over sixty schools, to redesign rules and provide regulation and conformity throughout organized football. Some of the radical rule changes included legalizing the forward pass (outlawed up to that point), abolishing the flying wedge (players locking arms to form a barrier), creating a neutral zone at the line of scrimmage further separating the teams at the start of play, the length of time for the game was reduce from one period of seventy minutes to two periods of thirty minutes each, the line to gain a new set of downs was increased to ten yards from five, and the number of officials was increased to four. The IAA’s authority did not end with football, but reached out to almost all other college level sports as well. A few years later this group was renamed the National Collegiate Athletics Association or NCAA.
The Advent of the Forward Pass: After the forward pass was legalized in football, the results were mixed owing in part to restrictions on how forward passes were to be executed. At first, a dropped pass resulted in a major penalty—fifteen yards from the spot the pass was thrown, and if it was not touched by any player on the offense, it resulted in a turnover. The receiver had to catch the ball withing twenty yards of the line of scrimmage, and could not catch the ball past the goal line (there was no endzone at the time). Blocking downfield for a receiver to catch a ball without the defense in the way was permitted. Although there were opponents of passing, there were also pioneers who sought to take advantage of it. Georgia Tech’s coach, John Heisman, believed that passing was the best way to open up the game to more effective movement of the ball and scoring. Saint Louis University’s coach, Eddie Cochems, trained his team to leverage forward passes to the extent that they outscored their opponents in 1906 by an aggregate score of 407-11 while going undefeated. Before the 1913 season, Notre Dame’s Gus Dorais and Knute Rockne perfected passing to the new zenith. In a game versus the military academy at West Point that caught nearly every football fan’s attention, Dorais had five passing touchdowns and completed fourteen out of seventeen pass attempts for 243 yards of passing offense. The rise of the forward pass led to a change in the shape of the football to a slimmer oval oblong shape that made it easier to throw the ball in a spiral that led to greater accuracy.
Conclusions: Football has come a long way from its violent origins. In addition to rule changes, the players’ equipment has greatly improved to limit and reduce the impact of injuries. Through the great organizational efforts of one man, Theodore Roosevelt, the game morphed from a slow-moving slug fest of heaps of human masses to a faster paced game where collisions still take place, but running up and down the field dominates the action. Recent polls have shown that Americans place football at the top of their lists of favorite spectator sports.
Sources: History.com, How Teddy Roosevelt Saved Football, By Christopher Klein, October 6, 2023.
History.com, How the Forward Pass Saved Football, By Christopher Klein, December 17, 2021.
History.com, Who Invented Football? September 25, 2013.
Wikipedia, 1906 College Football Season.