The White House and the Gridiron: Teddy Roosevelt’s Role in Football’s Evolution

Join us as we dive into an amazing story about how President Theodore Roosevelt impacted the game of football and see if we can uncover what really happened in this episode of Theodore Roosevelt's involvement.

And what did he really do for football?

How did it change?

It's all coming up in just a moment.

This is the Pigskin Daily History Dispatch, a podcast that covers the anniversaries of American football events throughout history.

Your host, Darren Hayes is podcasting from America's North Shore to bring you the memories of the gridiron one day at a time.

Hello, my football friends.

This is Darren Hayes.

Welcome once again to the Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history.

Football in the early 20th century was a brutal sport.

Players were often battered and bruised and fatalities were not uncommon.

The most significant factor attributed to the rise of injury and fatality was the emergence of the mass momentum plays.

And so the game started steering towards this, what ultimately became mass and momentum football.

So mass meaning, you know, it was basically like playing goal line football.

You know, a goal line offensive goal against goal line defense, all 110 yards of the field at the time.

And so, you know, the, the mass refers to the idea of multiple blockers leading the runner through the hole and, or grabbing him by the handles that he had sewn on his pants to pull him through the hole.

And the momentum referring to, you know, back then they didn't have rules on how many players had to be on the line of scrimmage.

So teams would, they had guards back or tackles back formations and different things.

And there was no limit on the number of men who could be moving forward at the snap, you know, similar to what Canada has in their football.

And so, you know, they'd have these guys running all at the same time and collapsing into a particular hole and just basically slamming into to, you know, to basically overrun one or two players on the defense.

And so it became, it was a very dangerous game.

And as a result, there were lots of injuries and ultimately deaths, you know, resulting from the nature of the play.

At the time, the public was outraged and calls for reform were getting louder.

Colleges and universities were under pressure to take action.

Many were considering banning the sport altogether, fearing the liability of allowing such a dangerous activity on their campuses.

It was clear that something needed to be done and fast to save the sport itself.

As the debate raged on, the need for change became more pressing.

And so he's making a little bit of noise on that.

But, you know, he just.

NYU wasn't a big enough team that people really were going to pay too much attention to him.

And.

So, you know, he, I think he was alive when he left the field, but he died, you know, shortly thereafter.

You know, and it was just one of those things where, you know, McCracken just said, this has to stop.

And so he, you know, wrote to, you know, kind of university presidents, chancellors, you know, kind of all over the place, published some things in newspapers and basically demanded that the rule that, you know, that there was an existing rules organization.

And he basically said, these people have not fixed this problem.

They've had their chances.

We're going to gather kind of a separate Congress or, you know, group of people come together in New York City and we're going to find, you know, we're going to develop new rules, new systems, whatever it takes to clean up the game.

And so they ended up, you know, there were 60, 70 representatives from universities, you know, primarily in the east, some of the Midwest, but Harvard was one of them.

So that was an important contributing university to that whole thing.

And out of that came what they called the Intercollegiate Athletic association of the United States.

And so they met and they identified a subcommittee that was going to work on developing new rules.

And but shortly after the turn of the year, so January of 06, they essentially took that subcommittee and merged it with the existing rules making body.

So the sport was at a crossroads and it was unclear which direction it would take.

Would it continue down the path of brutality and danger, or would it evolve into something safer and more organized?

It was tearing the fragile concept of college football apart into two divisions.

The old guard of traditional rule supporters like Princeton and Yale, among others, and McCracken's band of reformists and the general public on the other.

In the midst of the chaos, Theodore Roosevelt stepped in as president.

And so around that time, the Walter Camp style of play in American football, they were doing the mass plays, right?

And a lot of.

A lot of that mass plays was still just plunging the line, and they weren't doing a whole lot of end runs.

And of course, they didn't have the pass play, the forward pass play yet.

And so it was just a lot of violence.

You know, three.

Three yards to gain, or, excuse me, three downs to gain five yards.

It's just, you know, a bunch of violence to gain five yards.

And I imagine to the fan, it probably didn't look a whole lot different than the rugby scrum.

You know, sometimes when you're looking at what's going on in the field.

Right.

Yeah.

And so in nineteen four, after those many players died in one season, Teddy Roosevelt said, hey, we got to do something about this.

And he told the colleges to get together and figure something out.

Well, Walter Camp was part of Dill's rules makers.

And actually, less than two weeks after that meeting where Teddy Roosevelt assembled those college rules makers, less than two weeks later, Walter Camp traveled up to Hamilton, Ontario, and he watched a game that was played under the Burnside rules.

And after that game, they, you know, they had kind of a little banquet for him or whatever, because he was.

He was famous already.

And during that banquet, he had some criticisms of the Canadian game.

But he did say, though, that he saw value in three downs for 10 yards.

That was one of the things that he noted.

And that's the same year then that they adopted the forward pass.

And so.

And so Walter Camp, it's not clear, of course, whether it's because of Thrift Burnside that American football then went to three downs for 10.

But it certainly had an influence on Walter Camp.

And if he had already been thinking about three downs for 10 yards, I think that that game in Ontario maybe solidified it for him.

Roosevelt was motivated by more than just the public outcry.

He was a football fan himself, and he believed in the importance of physical activity for young men.

He saw the benefits of the sport, but he also saw the need to reform.

In life, as in a football game, the principle to follow is hit the line hard, don't foul, and don't shirk, but hit the line hard.

I believe in rough games and in rough, manly sports.

I do not feel any particular sympathy for the person who gets battered about a good deal so long as it is not fatal.

The president knew that if something wasn't done and soon the sport would be lost forever.

Concerned by the brutal nature of the game, he brought together coaches Walter Camp, Arthur T.

Mahildebrand and William T.

Reed, among others.

Roosevelt couldn't force their hand, but he believed in their ability to reform the sport and preserve the spirit.

He urged them to take action, to work together to create a set of rules that would make the game safer.

Through the voice of Dr.

William White, professor of surgery at the University of Pennsylvania, Roosevelt set a gentleman's agreement of sorts to try and give the opposing groups some guidance to reform.

This platform included uniform eligibility requirements for all schools, penalization of brutal conduct of players by officials in game and the school administrators afterwards, along with making the game officials accountable if they allowed any unruly violence.

And out of this meeting came the Intercollegiate Football association, the precursor to the ncaa.

And with this group, the new rules were established that would transform the game.

Some, such as adding a fourth down to reach a five yards line to gain a form of the forward passive was introduced.

But it was filled with rules that made it really unfavorable to use reduction in the overall game time, separation of the game into halves, along with other rules and revisions to open up the game and reduce the heavy mass momentum violence.

The meeting was a pivotal moment in the history of football.

It marked the beginning of a new era, one in which safety and organization would take precedence.

And it was all thanks to Roosevelt's intervention.

The regulations were far reaching, covering everything from the size of the playing field to the weight of the player's equipment.

They were designed to make the game safer, and they did just that.

Fatalities began to decline ever so slightly, but the game was starting to get just a little bit safer and the sport started to flourish.

1906 was the year it was legalized and it really did transform the game.

And that was a mandate that President Roosevelt really brought to bear because of, as you mentioned, the dangers of the game.

So many young men were either being critically injured or even dying that he said, if you don't do something about this, he called leaders from east coast teams, but also Mr.

Stagg together and said, you have to change the way this game is played or we're going to have to get rid of it, because it's just not sustainable.

And so one of those changes that was introduced was the forward pass.

And it's hard for us, I think, to imagine the game without it.

But at the time, we just recently celebrated the 150th anniversary of college football.

And it just kind of stood to reason that men would be injured.

And so the introduction of the forward pass really opened up the playing field.

And it obviously spread.

It provided for spread formations and a much more open game that relied on speed and skill.

Roosevelt's actions are believed that the President didn't just save the sport, they helped it grow into the popular phenomenon that it is today.

Without his intervention, it's possible that football would have faded into obscurity, a relic of a bygone era.

But what impact did Roosevelt really have in changing the game?

He gets much of the credit, but what is the reality of the historic meeting?

So, I mean, I think the whole thing with Roosevelt is a little bit overblown.

But you know, it was more, I think it was a high profile act on his part.

I mean, he really, there's nothing he could do to ban football, right?

But you know, he was a football.

Supporter, he was a fan.

His son played for Harvard, at least the freshman team at the time.

And he was a big believer in kind of that whole masculinity thing that was behind football at the time.

So he was a fan, so he wanted to make sure the game continued.

And at the end of the day, Harvard, Yale and Princeton controlled the game.

They were the schools that controlled the game.

And they had, they, they had core responsibility for the rulemaking bodies.

So, you know, anything that was wrong with football, it was due to the guys out east.

Thanks to Roosevelt, he funneled and was the impetus to force the old school ideas of camp in eastern schools with that of the voices of concerned public outcry and the university presidents, along with the innovators such as Stag and McCracken and Heisman.

So that the ideas of football became a safer, more organized sport that more changes would follow as this was a significant step towards the modern game and in doing so it became a beloved part of American culture.

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