The season is upon us

Get the game played on a thor­oughly clean basis!”

— Theodore Roosevelt

“Suc­cess — it’s what you do with what you’ve got.”

— Woody Hayes

Thanks­giv­ing is behind us and thus a new sea­son is upon us — Michi­gan sea­son. After all, Thanks­giv­ing was yes­ter­day and Advent doesn’t begin until Sun­day, so some­thing has to fill the gap. In Ohio, that some­thing is clearly focused on the foot­ball game to be played tomor­row in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

The game of foot­ball we see today is very dif­fer­ent than the game as it was played in its early days. Until 1906, the for­ward pass was ille­gal. The story behind how and why the rule was changed involves tragedy, tri­umph and pres­i­den­tial intervention.

By the turn of the cen­tury, col­lege foot­ball had already become a jug­ger­naut. Peo­ple are fond now of talk­ing about the money made from col­lege foot­ball, but a cen­tury ago Major League Base­ball games fre­quently attracted only a few thou­sand fans (game 3 of the 1905 World Series sported a crowd of only 10,000) but major col­lege foot­ball games often drew thou­sands more. Put another way, when Wrigley Field was built in 1914 it had a seat­ing capac­ity of 14,000 to house Major League Base­ball. When Ohio Sta­dium was built eight years later to house the Buck­eyes it had seats for more than 66,000.

Despite this, col­lege foot­ball was in trou­ble. The fans were there, but the play­ers were drop­ping quickly. The game was extremely vio­lent. In 1905 alone, three col­lege play­ers and 16 high school play­ers died as a result of injuries that they received on the field. The fre­quency and sever­ity of the injuries threat­ened to bring an end to the sport, fif­teen years before the NFL would even come into existence.

The Nov. 17, 1905 print­ing of the San Fran­cisco Chron­i­cle car­ried a ban­ner head­line, “Foot­ball Claims a heavy toll in lives.” Detail­ing the car­nage, the Chron­i­cle reported, “Three hard­ened, sea­soned and pre­sum­ably phys­i­cally fit col­lege men were slain. The oth­ers were ama­teurs. Body blows, pro­duc­ing inter­nal injuries were respon­si­ble for four deaths, con­cus­sions of the brain claimed six vic­tims, injuries to the spine resulted fatally in three cases, blood poi­son­ing car­ried off two grid­iron war­riors and other injuries caused four deaths.” Colum­bia Uni­ver­sity banned the sport entirely.

Into the fray stepped Teddy Roo­sevelt, the sit­ting Pres­i­dent of the United States. He was no stranger to foot­ball. When Roo­sevelt had formed his Rough Rid­ers more than a dozen of the young men who signed up listed their occu­pa­tion as “foot­ball player.” In the 1905 sea­son, Roosevelt’s eldest son, The­o­r­dore Jr., was a fresh­man on the Har­vard foot­ball team. Speak­ing at Har­vard that year, Roo­sevelt had com­mented, “Bru­tal­ity in play­ing a game should awaken the hearti­est and most plainly shown con­tempt for the player guilty of it.” Just weeks later the Oct. 15, 1905 edi­tion of the Salt Lake Her­ald con­tains an illus­trated front page story titled, “Teddy Roo­sevelt Jr. is hurt on foot­ball field” and con­tain­ing details of a minor injury the younger Roo­sevelt suf­fered in practice.

So T.R. called an audi­ble and sum­moned rep­re­sen­ta­tives from the big three foot­ball schools (Har­vard, Yale and Prince­ton) to the White House, insist­ing that they find ways to make the game safer. The Amer­i­can Inter­col­le­giate Rules Com­mit­tee was formed with rep­re­sen­ta­tives from 62 col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties and from that rules com­mit­tee came sweep­ing changes for the 1906 sea­son that gave us the game that we see on the field today.

Most dras­ti­cally, the for­ward pass was made legal, though not exactly in the man­ner that we see it today. A pass of under five yards was ruled a turnover and a pass com­pleted into the end zone was a touch­back. An incom­plete pass resulted in a 15 yard penalty. For these rea­sons it was sev­eral sea­sons, and sev­eral more rule changes, before the for­ward pass really caught on. The first legal for­ward pass also has an Ohio con­nec­tion. It was thrown by St. Louis University’s Brad­bury Robin­son from Belle­vue — a town of 8,000 that strad­dles four dif­fer­ent coun­ties in north­ern Ohio.

So, while you’re (hope­fully) enjoy­ing the game tomor­row, remem­ber that foot­ball was not saved by a great play or bril­liant coach, but rather by the actions of one very impor­tant fan who used the power of the pres­i­dency to change the game forever.

David Hej­manowski is a mag­is­trate and court admin­is­tra­tor at the Delaware County Juve­nile Court and a for­mer Assis­tant Pros­e­cut­ing Attorney.

Posted by Dave Hejmanowski on Nov 24 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.