How college football's deadliest year built the NCAA

A listener emailed the Throughline team with a stunning factoid: Teddy Roosevelt helped create the NCAA to make college football safer. But is it true? What we find is weirder, grislier, and pettier than we expected. Guests: Denis Crawford, historian and exhibit designer at the College Football Hall of Fame Eric Moyen, Dean of the Bagwell College of Education at Kennesaw State University and author of College Sports: A History Support public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org http://plus.npr.org/. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

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• 0:00Speaker 00

  This message comes from Rosetta Stone, offering an alternative approach to language learning. Without relying on traditional memorization, the platform guides users to intuitively think in a second language. More information at rosettastone.com.

• 0:18Speaker 01

  Rund, I need you to forget everything you know about me. I am now a football coach in the late 1800s.

• 0:26Rund Abdelfatah?

  Oh, God, OK.

• 0:28Speaker 01

  You and I are on a football field. This is the biggest game of the season.

• 0:34Rund Abdelfatah?

  OK.

• 0:35Speaker 01

  We're in the last four minutes of the game, make or break.

• 0:40Rund Abdelfatah?

  I'm sorry, am I supposed to be on this team that you're coaching?

• 0:42Speaker 01

  Yes, you are the star player of the team.

• 0:44Rund Abdelfatah?

  No, no, no, I don't think you want that.

• 0:48Speaker 01

  And I have an idea for a play that's going to catapult us to victory, if you will.

• 0:55Speaker 01

  The ball is snapped.

• 0:57Rund Abdelfatah?

  Aha, aha.

• 0:58Speaker 01

  And then what's going to happen is we're going to take some of our guys, arrange a solid base. And here's where the plan really comes together. We get you the football. We're going to place you right at the front. And then all of that muscle backing you up is going to push you into the air, pow, right over that defensive line.

• 1:22Rund Abdelfatah?

  Sorry, I just want to understand. They're going to throw me, basically, with the ball?

• 1:27Speaker 01

  That's correct.

• 1:31Speaker 01

  This is a real football play from the 1800s. And I guess you should know before we launch you into this that there's just one small risk, which is that there is a defensive maneuver that's evolved to combat this.

• 1:41Rund Abdelfatah?

  Oh, God.

• 1:42Speaker 01

  Can you guess what it is?

• 1:44Rund Abdelfatah?

  Another person, another catapulted human being. Like, two missiles in the air colliding.

• 1:50Speaker 01

  That's exactly it.

• 1:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, you would try and meet them in midair, which, we're talking wily coyote-type results.

• 1:59Rund Abdelfatah?

  No, I would like to exit this scenario, please. Shake me out, coach, shake me out.

• 2:08Rund Abdelfatah?

  I'm Rund Abdelfatah, and you're listening to Throughline from NPR. OK, so a few months ago, we asked you, our listeners, to send us your questions. And we heard from you about everything from big geopolitical histories to small, everyday things that had been nagging at you. And today, one of our producers, Sarah Wyman, is here to answer one of those questions.

• 2:29Speaker 01

  To be fair, this wasn't technically a question. One of our listeners, Michael George, emailed us with what I consider a stunning fact. The NCAA was formed to make college football safer at the urging of Teddy Roosevelt.

• 2:43Rund Abdelfatah?

  What a nugget. All right, thank you, Michael.

• 2:46Speaker 01

  So the NCAA is, of course, the National Collegiate Athletic Association.

• 2:50Rund Abdelfatah?

  Right.

• 2:51Speaker 01

  This is the umbrella org that oversees all of college sports. And, Rund, when we got this email, it piqued my interest almost instantly for a couple of reasons. One is I'm a fan of college football.

• 3:03Rund Abdelfatah?

  I know this about you.

• 3:04Speaker 01

  But I also have some complicated feelings about the fact that I'm a college football fan, because I think football can be dangerous. Like, if you watch football, odds are you've seen someone get injured. And sometimes people get seriously injured playing this game.

• 3:17Rund Abdelfatah?

  Right, right. And it sounds like that's kind of what Michael George is getting at in his email?

• 3:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, when I read this email and saw the tidbit about the NCAA being created in part to prevent injury in college football, my reaction was, wait, is this true?

• 3:36Rund Abdelfatah?

  Yeah, good question, yeah.

• 3:38Speaker 01

  So I started digging. And the story that I found is even stranger and even more violent than what I expected. Human catapults are really just the tip of the iceberg here.

• 3:51Rund Abdelfatah?

  So thank you, Michael, for sparking this question. We're going to get into all of that after this very quick break.

• 4:07Speaker 04

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• 5:33Speaker 01

  So where do I find you? Are you in some kind of basement?

• 5:37Speaker 03

  I'm kept away from the general population.

• 5:41Speaker 01

  This is Denis Crawford.

• 5:42Speaker 03

  And I am the historian and exhibit designer at the College Football Hall of Fame in Atlanta, Georgia.

• 5:48Speaker 01

  He's not actually in a basement. Dennis was in the archives of the National College Football Hall of Fame.

• 5:54Rund Abdelfatah?

  Oh, cool. Could you see anything over Zoom when you talked to him?

• 5:57Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. The shelves in the background were full of, like, old helmets, commemorative bobbleheads.

• 6:05Speaker 03

  That's about 150 years' worth of game programs.

• 6:08Speaker 01

  Wow. Oh, that's really cool. And then I could see the actual archives, too. So lots of folders and binders.

• 6:15Rund Abdelfatah?

  Oh, fun. I'm sorry you didn't get to go there in person.

• 6:18Speaker 01

  I know, me too.

• 6:18Rund Abdelfatah?

  And it had to be over Zoom.

• 6:19Speaker 01

  And you know this, I've been jockeying for this made-up role of the Throughline sports correspondent for a long time now. So I'm hoping I'll make it there one day.

• 6:26Rund Abdelfatah?

  Yeah, you're on your way, you're on your way.

• 6:29Speaker 01

  One of the first things that I asked Dennis about was how in the world that whole human catapult situation could have been considered fair play?

• 6:37Rund Abdelfatah?

  Yeah.

• 6:38Speaker 01

  And he told me the game of football used to be way more violent than it is today. And also, nobody was wearing any protective equipment of any kind.

• 6:48Speaker 03

  The concept of head protection was just merely growing your hair long and then putting a stocking cap on top to hold it in place.

• 6:55Rund Abdelfatah?

  Sarah, you were throwing me in the air, and I didn't even have a helmet on?

• 6:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it is a situation where you may have wanted to be wearing a helmet, because at the time, the idea of strategy was very different.

• 7:09Rund Abdelfatah?

  What do you mean?

• 7:09Speaker 01

  Well, so Americans started playing football as early as the colonial period. And it started out looking a lot more like soccer, English football, if you will. But by the 1870s, when people are now playing and tossing each other in the air and ramming into each other at full force, the game had evolved to look a lot more like rugby. So according to the rules, you're not allowed to throw the ball forward.

• 7:34Rund Abdelfatah?

  What does that mean? You couldn't throw the ball forward? That feels very central to how the game is played.

• 7:40Speaker 01

  Today, yes, you're throwing passes. People are running all the way down the field and catching them in heroic fashions. You know, you have formations that you're running. But back then, that's not how you play.

• 7:54Speaker 01

  Every play on the field was a running play.

• 7:57Speaker 03

  It's bodies slamming against bodies. It's a game of trying to hold on to the ball as long as possible, running down your opponent, brutalizing the opponent, breaking their spirit, and then coming off the field victorious.

• 8:19Rund Abdelfatah?

  And breaking their spirit. It sounds like it was just kind of brute force. Run away as fast as you can before you get tackled.

• 8:25Speaker 01

  Now you are not thinking like a linebacker. You want to run as fast as you can into the other team, Rund.

• 8:31Rund Abdelfatah?

  No, again, I can't be back in this scenario.

• 8:36Speaker 01

  The word for these plays at the time was a mass momentum play.

• 8:40Speaker 03

  The flying wedge was the biggest mass momentum play. And that's where you're basically in a V formation. There's one guy at the tip of the spear, and you're just driving your way through the line of the opponent.

• 8:51Speaker 01

  The reason they called this play "The Flying Wedge," by the way, is because that is also the name of a very deadly military formation that this play was referencing.

• 9:00Rund Abdelfatah?

  No, I have to be honest, like, as you've been describing this, there's an element of battle or warfare that is naturally coming to my mind. Like, it feels almost like it's mirroring war.

• 9:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I asked Dennis about that. And he was very clear that football wasn't meant to replace war. Like, the athletes and the coaches weren't thinking of it as play-acting war. But it was, whether by accident or on purpose, encouraging a lot of qualities that were valued in young men and in soldiers at the time. Like, being able to take orders from leadership, working as a team towards a shared objective. Also, these qualities like strength and bravery. It would require some bravery to run headfirst into a line of burly men who are trying to drill you into the ground.

• 9:49Rund Abdelfatah?

  Yeah.

• 9:49Speaker 01

  And Dennis says fundamentally, all of that speaks to the time in which this was happening.

• 9:55Speaker 03

  During this era, we've left the Civil War. We're moving from an agrarian society where people had to make their livings with the physicality of their labor to a more commercial-oriented, sedentary lifestyle. And there was a lot of concern. We are looking for ways to keep that physical edge so that if we had to enter into a combat situation again, our young men would be prepared. And so football was a very popular training ground for developing that hand-to-hand combat sensation.

• 10:32Rund Abdelfatah?

  Okay, so this is happening. Is anyone being like, hey, guys, we should maybe try to wear some protective gear or something? I mean,

• 10:42Speaker 01

  People were getting hurt. And 1905 is a really important year in the history of college football and also the NCAA. This is a year that newspapers at the time will go on to dub the death harvest because it is so deadly in terms of the injuries sustained on the football field.

• 11:02Rund Abdelfatah?

  Oh, my god.

• 11:03Speaker 01

  The reports around this vary, but somewhere around 19 people died playing football in 1905.

• 11:09Rund Abdelfatah?

  Wow.

• 11:09Speaker 01

  137 were seriously injured. Not all of them were college athletes. Some of them were high schoolers and some of them were amateurs who weren't playing in college leagues. But all of them were injured or died playing football.

• 11:22Rund Abdelfatah?

  Wow.

• 11:23Speaker 01

  And I'm going to read you an excerpt from a San Francisco newspaper called The Call. Body blows producing internal injuries were responsible for four deaths. Concussion of the brain claimed six victims. Injuries to the spine resulted fatally in three cases. And they go on to list other injuries that weren't fatal, like broken collarbones. And then 19 fractures to some portion of the head.

• 11:48Rund Abdelfatah?

  So this would have stood out as like very distinctly harmful to students who are playing it.

• 11:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:57Rund Abdelfatah?

  When does Teddy Roosevelt, right, our guy Teddy Roosevelt, when does he enter the picture? Like, when does he start to pay attention to what's happening on these college campuses?

• 12:06Speaker 01

  Well, Teddy Roosevelt is someone who, A, read the newspaper.

• 12:10Rund Abdelfatah?

  Presumably, right, okay.

• 12:11Speaker 01

  So that may have been how he first became aware of it.

• 12:13Rund Abdelfatah?

  Yeah.

• 12:14Speaker 01

  But the other thing, Teddy Roosevelt is kind of a football guy.

• 12:18Rund Abdelfatah?

  Yeah, did he play?

• 12:19Speaker 01

  He didn't play because he was like kind of a sickly child. He had asthma.

• 12:23Rund Abdelfatah?

  Okay.

• 12:23Speaker 01

  But like a big part of his personality and his policy as president was that he believed that strenuous activity could cure people of ailments like asthma. So his sons played football. And one of his sons was actually one of the players who was injured in the 1905 season.

• 12:39Rund Abdelfatah?

  Oh, okay.

• 12:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, he sustained an injury

• 12:41Rund Abdelfatah?

  Well, that would have caught his attention.

• 12:42Speaker 01

  to his forehead. And I don't know for sure what Teddy Roosevelt's reaction to that was, but I'm imagining that like he probably thought getting punched in the face built character. But he also was like a reasonable person who was seeing lots of 18, 19, 20-year-old men dying, men who incidentally could have been useful to their country. And he was like, we, we need less death.

• 13:03Speaker 03

  He loved the sport, but I think he was a pragmatist and a realist, which is this isn't something people should be dying to do.

• 13:13Speaker 01

  So he calls the presidents of the big three football universities, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, into his office. And he says, we need fewer people to die. I'm on your side. No one's in trouble.

• 13:26Rund Abdelfatah?

  Okay.

• 13:27Speaker 01

  But I'm going to leave you here and you need to figure this out.

• 13:30Speaker 03

  I think he really was trying to put the fear of the bully pulpit into these college football coaches and administrators.

• 13:41Speaker 01

  And so here's where I want to introduce you to someone else I talked to. His name is Eric Moyen. He co-wrote a book called College Sports: A History.

• 13:49Speaker 05

  And I am the dean of the Bagwell College of Education at Kennesaw State University in Georgia.

• 13:58Speaker 01

  Eric read me in on the real drama here. And everything that happens next in this story is part of a power struggle.

• 14:05Rund Abdelfatah?

  Oh, yeah, okay, bring me some drama.

• 14:07Speaker 01

  And real plot twist, it turns out Teddy Roosevelt was actually not that big a part of it.

• 14:12Rund Abdelfatah?

  Oh.

• 14:13Speaker 01

  This meeting that he called where he brings in these college coaches actually ends up being sort of a nothing burger.

• 14:19Speaker 05

  Harvard, Princeton, and Yale said, okay, well, we'll work on some rules changes. But that meeting was in October 1905.

• 14:26Speaker 01

  These presidents are not that incentivized to bring around changes to college football at this moment because they're all really good at college football, exactly the way it's being played.

• 14:35Rund Abdelfatah?

  Oh, I see.

• 14:35Speaker 01

  And they don't want their competition to get better. So for a month after that meeting, nothing happens.

• 14:41Rund Abdelfatah?

  Okay, so the Teddy Roosevelt thing, that was kind of a red herring.

• 14:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:45Rund Abdelfatah?

  Hmm.

• 14:46Speaker 01

  It was not as important as a Google search would lead you to believe.

• 14:50Rund Abdelfatah?

  So then what was the tipping point if it wasn't that?

• 14:54Speaker 01

  Last game of the season, November 1905.

• 14:58Speaker 05

  Over Thanksgiving weekend, a football game between NYU and Union College resulted in a a young man's death.

• 15:07Speaker 01

  And the chancellor of NYU at that point says, I've had enough. This can't keep happening. Too many people are dying. So he sends the president of Harvard a telegram asking him to call another meeting. And Harvard's president says, no, we're good.

• 15:23Rund Abdelfatah?

  Hmm.

• 15:24Speaker 01

  So at this point, NYU's chancellor hosts his own meeting. And he invites to that meeting the president of any university that has a college football team, not just those big three.

• 15:36Rund Abdelfatah?

  So he's going against the big three.

• 15:38Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 15:39Rund Abdelfatah?

  That's the big deal.

• 15:40Speaker 05

  And that group decided they needed a new rules committee.

• 15:44Speaker 01

  All of this results in what eventually becomes the NCAA. It takes years to get there, but from the beginning, the NCAA is designed to be an advisory board that's going to cover all college sports, not just football.

• 15:59Rund Abdelfatah?

  So this is a big, big moment, right? At what point do they turn to the safety question of actually addressing what caused the death harvest?

• 16:10Speaker 01

  Almost immediately.

• 16:11Rund Abdelfatah?

  Oh.

• 16:12Speaker 01

  They're talking about changing the rules to make college football safer.

• 16:15Speaker 05

  A first down used to be five yards and they changed it to 10 yards.

• 16:19Speaker 01

  By 1906, they've legalized the forward pass.

• 16:23Speaker 05

  And the idea was to spread the players out so there wouldn't be these massive pile-ons.

• 16:30Speaker 01

  So instead of having these two lines of meat running into each other at full speed, you're now having people running further down the field to catch the ball.

• 16:38Rund Abdelfatah?

  So they formed this new organization that'll become the NCAA to address safety? Is that the only issue that they were focusing on at that point?

• 16:50Speaker 01

  The thing is, it actually was never just about safety. From the start, they were discussing a lot of the same issues that are still central to the NCAA today.

• 17:02Speaker 05

  Pay for play is a huge one. Academics, are we cheating and letting kids in? Are we making them take classes? Those kinds of things.

• 17:14Speaker 01

  And the other big issue they were talking about is this idea of amateurism.

• 17:19Rund Abdelfatah?

  Hmm.

• 17:20Speaker 01

  Should all of these players have to be amateurs? Should they have access to what we call NIL or name, image, likeness today, right? The ability to leverage their reputation and their performance and their image playing a college sport to make money for themselves? They were talking about that already in 1905.

• 17:40Speaker 05

  Players were getting paid. They were switching schools based on the offers they would get. Local shops would pay players to smoke a specific cigarette and then sell them on campus to their friends.

• 17:52Speaker 01

  And the last big issue on the table was power. Who has the power to enforce these new rules? Is it going to be the NCAA, universities, coaches? They've created this new organization. They've made up these new rules. But it's not clear what kind of teeth the NCAA actually had, or if it had any at all.

• 18:13Rund Abdelfatah?

  Seems like something you kind of still hear about today.

• 18:16Speaker 01

  Cue the newest montage. Coaches across the top level of the sport are all in agreement on one thing. College football is a mess. Pain college athletes. These name, image, and likeness deals have become big issues.

• 18:30Speaker 06

  The transfer portal. Everyone's mad. I'm concerned for college football right now, and I think a lot of people are. Do I want to be a Sun Devil more than I want another $300,000?

• 18:40Speaker 07

  Why in the hell are we allowing coaches to walk out and be paid not to coach for years?

• 18:49Speaker 01

  Today, the NCAA is obviously much bigger. There's more money involved. The dynamics have gotten even more complicated than they were 100 years ago. And all of this is raising the same questions that people were sitting around discussing in those meetings more than 100 years ago.

• 19:07Speaker 03

  Now we're coming back to an era where there's major problems, where it's going to be conferences and coaches that have to sit down and agree upon rules, which is exactly what they were doing 120 years ago. Only that time it was about player safety.

• 19:25Speaker 05

  Now we're kind of back to the beginning again where we're wondering what is going to become the agency that regulates this at some level? And of course, the question then will be, and for what purpose?

• 19:38Speaker 01

  We reached out to the NCAA to ask how it defines its ever-evolving role in the 21st century. The NCAA did not respond to our request for comment.

• 19:53Rund Abdelfatah?

  Well, I'm really glad that Michael George set you down this rabbit hole, Sarah. And to all you folks listening, if you have a question of your own or if you have a side quest for us with an interesting nugget you can't stop thinking about, send us an email at [email protected] or call 872-588-8805 and leave a voicemail. We might feature your idea in an upcoming episode. And thanks, and thank you, Sarah.

• 20:21Speaker 01

  Thank you. Always a thrill to be here and talk sports. Go Bruins.

• 20:31Rund Abdelfatah?

  And that's it for today's show. Throughline was created by me and Ramtin Atablui. This episode was produced by me and

• 20:39Speaker 06

  Sarah Wyman. Jasmine Romero. Julia Redpath. Leanna Simstra. Amy Kadua. Molly Marcello. Skylar Swenson.

• 20:48Rund Abdelfatah?

  Irene Noguchi. This episode was fact-checked by Sasiel Davis-Vasquez. It was mixed by Jimmy Keely. Music by Ramtin Atablui and his band, Drop Electric. Thanks also to Jeff Leon and Johannes Dergi. I'm Randa Abdel Fattah. Thanks for listening.

• 21:09Speaker 00

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