7/26/2023 0 Comments Football story![]() ![]() An incomplete pass resulted in a 15-yard penalty, and a pass that dropped without being touched meant possession went to the defensive team. ![]() ![]() Passes couldn’t be thrown over the line on five yards to either side of the center. Established coaches in the elite Eastern schools like Army, Harvard, Pennsylvania and Yale failed to embrace the pass. But at first, it didn’t seem like a radical move. Their biggest change was to make the forward pass legal, beginning the transformation of football into the modern game. They made a number of changes, including banning the “flying wedge,” a mass formation that often caused serious injury, created the neutral zone between offense and defense and required teams to move 10 yards, not 5, in three downs. So in December representatives of 62 schools met in New York to change the rules and make the game safer. In a commencement address at the school earlier in the year, Roosevelt alluded to the increasingly violent nature of football saying, “Brutality in playing a game should awaken the heartiest and most plainly shown contempt for the player guilty of it.” There were 18 fatalities nationwide that year, including three college players (the rest were high-school athletes), and President Theodore Roosevelt, whose son was on the freshmen team at Harvard University, made it clear he wanted reforms amid calls by some to abolish the college game. But it was also an increasingly violent and deadly passion. By 1905, college football was all the rage, attracting tens of thousands of fans to games at a time when major-league baseball teams often attracted only 3,000-and pro football was still more than a decade away. ![]()
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