Football Organizes across the Country

In this edition of the Football History Rewind, we are looking at the end of 1905 through the beginning of 1906 as Football was forced to reorganize and reform after President Theodore Roosevelt requested change.

Football History Rewind Part 22 left off our story in early 1906. If you recall, we eluded that President Theodore Roosevelt had just held three meetings at the White House with the leaders of football asking that they "tame" their game to some degree to protect its players from injury and even death. The public was becoming
outraged at the game’s roughness prior to this and some college presidents were abolishing their respective schools from any connection to the game due
to its roughness.

24 December 1905

It seems very befitting that Christmas Eve of 1905 would be the day chosen for a large group representing twenty-eight colleges to meet at the request of
Chancellor Henry M. McCracken in New York City. This shows the dedication of these pioneers of football many of whom sacrificed spending
time with their own families at this holiday to attend. There were people such as H. L. Williams, the Director of Athletics at Minnesota and F. H. Curtiss
from Texas who had traveled great distances to be at this historic meeting!

This December meeting did little on the subject of actual rules changes but it was a very large success in organizing the world of football. This conference
of colleges soon assumed the name of National Intercollegiate Football Conference but later changed its name to be the Intercollegiate Athletic
Association of the United States.

It was not a totally unified body at this time though as only one representative of all the schools in the old rules making body was present, and that was
Harvard. The group needed the presence of schools like Yale, Princeton and Pennsylvania to give true merit to reform.

1905 College Champions

The 1905 college football season had the Chicago Maroons retroactively named as national champion by the Billingsley Report, the Helms Athletic Foundation, the National Championship Foundation, and the Houlgate System. Yale was allegedly named champion by Parke H. Davis and Caspar Whitney. Chicago sported an 11-0 record while the Eli secored an untarnished 10-0 ledger themselves. I think co-champions is a fair award in this season.

The Massillon Tigers were the top team in pro football as they outlasted the newly formed Canton Athletic Club and the Shelby Blues for the Ohio State title, which in turn represented the best football at the professional level in that era.
 

12 January 1906

It was along the lines of pure genius as to how the I.A.A.U. got the missing schools to participate. The meeting title of this 12 January conference seemed
to do the trick as it was called the Joint Session of the Intercollegiate and Conference Committees. The old committee of football rules makers were
invited as a valid and recognized body to participate with the newly established board to reform the rules of the game. The important thing is that
it worked, men such as Alonzo Stagg of the University of Chicago, Walter Camp of Yale, and Paul J. Dashiell of Navy were now sitting at the same table
with men such as C. D. Daly of Army, J. T. Lees of Nebraska and J. A. Babbitt of Haverford. The amendments to the rules at this joint session would
have little impact on the game itself but it did organize all of football under one set of rules. The amendments did a lot in shaping the game toward what
we recognize in our rule books of today.

1. The officials during the game would be the Referee, Two Umpires and a linesman. It was noted though that one of the Umpires could be eliminated ina contest by mutual agreement of the two participating teams.
2. The games would consist of two halves with a duration of thirty minutes each. A ten minute intermission would separate the two halves. This excluded another rule that allowed the captain of each side to request up to three timeouts per half (sound familiar?).
3. A scrimmage was defined as when the holder of the ball places it flat on the ground with its long axis at right angles to the line of scrimmage and puts it in play by either kicking it forward or snapping it backwards.
4. The line of scrimmage was established as an imaginary line parallel to the goal-lines and passing through the point of the ball closest to the side in possession’s own goal.
5. A fair catch was determined as a player who during a kick raised his hand clearly above his head as a signal of his intention to catch the ball and not toadvance in order to receive protection of going uncontacted. He was permitted to take no more than two steps after this catch.
6. A player would be considered "down" when any portion of his body other than his feet or hands touched the ground while he was being touched by an opponent.
7. Tripping was illegal and it was defined as when any player obstructed an opponent by contacting him in any way below the knee.
8. Protection was afforded the snapper-back from contact until the ball was actually in play.
9. The ordinary five men of the offensive line (center, guards and tackles) could not drop back into the backfield unless they went five yards deep behind the line of scrimmage and were replaced at their line position by a player normally in the backfield.
10. Holding was defined as; grasping and opponent with the hands or arms, placing the hands or arms on an opponent to push him away, or circling an opponent’s body with the arms.

These rules changes did not change the game substantially at this meeting but subsequent and frequent meeting followed. At one of these a proposal by John
C. Bell of Pennsylvania and Paul J. Dashiell of Navy set the stage for probably the most radical change football ever saw, the forward pass. Space is running
low in this segment so we will have to pick up here in our next installment of Football History Rewind.

The picture in the banner above is of early football courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and is called Teddy's hunting adventures in Africa. Shooting Pictures! This small comic strip booklet was designed by Max Wilhelm Schaberschul, a painter, illustrator and cartoonist. This illustration is from 1910.

Special Thanks to the book How Football Became Football by Timothy P. Brown and we are able to give this in depth look from so long ago in history by careful research. Using someone who was contemporary to the period is the best source. So a very special shout out to our main source of reference information for this article is from Parke H. Davis in his 1911 book Football-The American Intercollegiate Game.