How Teddy Roosevelt saved football

Jul 29, 2015, 6:35 AM

At the turn of the 20th century, America’s football gridirons were killing fields. Football was a grinding, bruising sport in which the forward pass was illegal and brute strength was required to move the ball. Players locked arms in mass formations and used their helmetless heads as battering rams. Gang tackles routinely buried ball carriers underneath a ton and a half of tangled humanity. The 1905 football season resulted in 19 player deaths and 137 serious injuries.

With little protective equipment, players sustained gruesome injuries—wrenched spinal cords, crushed skulls and broken ribs that pierced their hearts. The Chicago Tribune reported that in 1904 alone, there were 18 football deaths and 159 serious injuries. Obituaries of young pigskin players ran on a nearly weekly basis during the football season. The carnage appalled America. Newspaper editorials called on colleges and high schools to banish football outright. A Cincinnati Commercial Tribune cartoon depicted the Grim Reaper on a goalpost surveying a twisted mass of fallen players. The sport reached such a crisis that one of its biggest boosters—President Theodore Roosevelt—got involved.

Although his nearsightedness kept him off the Harvard varsity squad, Roosevelt was a vocal exponent of football’s contribution to the “strenuous life,” both on and off the field. As New York City police commissioner, he helped revive the annual Harvard-Yale football series after it had been canceled for two years following the violent 1894 clash that was deemed “the bloodbath at Hampden Park.” His belief that the football field was a proving ground for the battlefield was validated by the performance of his fellow Rough Riders who were former football standouts. “In life, as in a football game,” he wrote, “the principle to follow is: Hit the line hard; don’t foul and don’t shirk, but hit the line hard!”

Football, however, was fatal, and even Roosevelt acknowledged it required reform if it was to be saved. With his son Theodore Jr. now playing for the Harvard freshman team, he had a paternal interest in reforming the game as well. In the freshman tilt against Yale, the president’s son was bruised and his nose broken—deliberately, according to some accounts. The following week, the Harvard varsity nearly walked off the field while playing against Yale after their captain was leveled by an illegal hit on a fair catch that left his nose broken and bloodied. The same afternoon, Union College halfback Harold Moore died of a cerebral hemorrhage after being kicked in the head while attempting to tackle a New York University runner. It was a grim end to a savage season.

Following the season, Stanford and California switched to rugby while Columbia, Northwestern and Duke dropped football. Harvard president Charles Eliot, who considered football “more brutalizing than prizefighting, cockfighting or bullfighting,” warned that Harvard could be next, a move that would be a crushing blow to the college game and the Harvard alum in the Oval Office. Roosevelt again used his bully pulpit. He urged the Harvard coach and other leading football authorities to push for radical rule changes, and he invited other school leaders to the White House in the offseason.

Roosevelt sought to end violence on the football field as well as the battlefield. The First Fan summoned the head coaches and representatives of the premier collegiate powers—Harvard, Yale and Princeton—to the White House on October 9, 1905. Roosevelt urged them to curb excessive violence and set an example of fair play for the rest of the country. The schools released a statement condemning brutality and pledging to keep the game clean.

An intercollegiate conference, which would become the forerunner of the NCAA, approved radical rule changes for the 1906 season. They legalized the forward pass, abolished the dangerous mass formations, created a neutral zone between offense and defense and doubled the first-down distance to 10 yards, to be gained in three downs. The rule changes didn’t eliminate football’s dangers, but fatalities declined—to 11 per year in both 1906 and 1907—while injuries fell sharply. A spike in fatalities in 1909 led to another round of reforms that further eased restrictions on the forward pass and formed the foundation of the modern sport.

Courtesy of http://www.history.com/news/how-teddy-roosevelt-saved-football

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there is another side/interpretation to the story:

"A newspaper story from that year, illustrated with the Grim Reaper laughing on a goalpost, counted 25 college players killed during football season. A fairy-tale version of the founding of the NCAA holds that President Theodore Roosevelt, upset by a photograph of a bloodied Swarthmore College player, vowed to civilize or destroy football. The real story is that Roosevelt maneuvered shrewdly to preserve the sport—and give a boost to his beloved Harvard. After McClure’s magazine published a story on corrupt teams with phantom students, a muckraker exposed Walter Camp’s $100,000 slush fund at Yale. In response to mounting outrage, Roosevelt summoned leaders from Harvard, Princeton, and Yale to the White House, where Camp parried mounting criticism and conceded nothing irresponsible in the college football rules he’d established. At Roosevelt’s behest, the three schools issued a public statement that college sports must reform to survive, and representatives from 68 colleges founded a new organization that would soon be called the National Collegiate Athletic Association. A Haverford College official was confirmed as secretary but then promptly resigned in favor of Bill Reid, the new Harvard coach, who instituted new rules that benefited Harvard’s playing style at the expense of Yale’s. At a stroke, Roosevelt saved football and dethroned Yale."

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/10/the-shame-of-college-sports/308643/

Prior to the 1905 meeting that Roosevelt called, Yale had won 4 of 5 and was 8-2-2 over the the previous 12. Harvard didn't invent the flying wedge, but it was them, not Yale, that used it to devastating effect. In the aftermath of Roosevelt's intrusion into college football Harvard would go 5-3-2 over the next 10 years and 9-4-2 over the next 15 years. If that doesn't seem dramatic realize that Harvard had only won 4 games since 1875 against Yale.

How Teddy Roosevelt saved football

Re: How Teddy Roosevelt saved football

Thought it was very interesting. Worth the read and share.

wish he could eliminate the "woo hoo."***

Nick saban saved football .. everyone knows that.***

Just ask him.....***

Re: How Teddy Roosevelt saved football

Is this a joke?

My favorite Pres., also created the Natl Park system, won a

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