Here’s the true story of how Teddy Roosevelt saved football
Editor’s note: This story was originally published Aug 8, 2023.
As college football season is approaching, many are waiting in great anticipation to see if their team will triumph over their opponents.
However, injuries sustained in the football season make it hard to predict what will happen.
While many reportedly dub football as a “dangerous sport” it is nothing compared to how the game used to be played and, we can thank the 26th U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt for that.
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How did Teddy Roosevelt save football?
History reported that, “at the turn of the 20th century, America’s football gridirons were killings field,” and that while the sport drew massive crowds to come spectate, “football in the early 1900s was lethally brutal — a grinding, bruising sport in which the forward pass was illegal and brute strength was required to move the ball.”
The sport was so violent prior to Roosevelt’s influence, that in 1894 there was an annual game between Harvard and Yale that was so violent it was called “The Hampden Park Blood Bath.”
This particular game of football resulted in “upwards of five players” being hospitalized, according to the Yale Daily News.
“The record of French duels for the last dozen years fails to show such a list of casualties as this one game of football produced,” The New York Times reported on the game. “Black eyes, sore shins, and strained backs cut no figure in this contest.”
In 1905, The Chicago Tribune reportedly published a headline that year titled as “Football Year’s Death Harvest” as 19 college football players had been killed playing the sport with 138 injured.
After the Harvard and Yale annual football game was suspended for two years after 1894, Roosevelt, an avid supporter of the sport, sought to “revive the annual Harvard-Yale football series,” while acknowledging that the sport needed to change, according to History.
The New York Times reported that it was when Roosevelt’s son, Theodore Jr., joined the Harvard freshman team and began to receive injuries from the sport that Roosevelt decided to call in representatives from the top football schools to make the game less violent.
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Teddy Roosevelt’s son saved football
Just as Roosevelt was reportedly negotiating the end of the Russo-Japanese War, he began gathering together with these representatives to determine how to make football less violent.
Smithsonian Magazine detailed that after much back and forth, the representatives came up with some changes to the sport:
Make first down 10 yards instead of 5 yards.
The addition of the forward pass so teams can move the ball down the field without shoving into each other as much as they used to.
A neutral zone authorized between offense and defense.
The forward pass was reportedly one change that was met with a lot of hesitation from coaches across the country.
In the early 1900s, there were no forward passes, rules regarding whether or not passes could be thrown over the 5-yard line or rules regarding incomplete passes in the sport until 1906, according to History.
“Because of these rules and the fact coaches at that time thought the forward pass was a sissified type of play that wasn’t really football, they were hesitant to adopt this new strategy,” historian Kent Stephens with the College Football Hall of Fame in South Bend, Indiana, said.
In 1906, the changes to the sport were legalized, according to reports, and while they didn’t ultimately take away all of the dangers, the new rules resulted in a decline of deaths and injuries.
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