Football was almost banned in 1905

Modern football is not a refinement of the old game. It is a replacement, built in a hurry, because the old one was killing people.

The death harvest

There were roughly twenty football fatalities in 1905 alone, and at least forty-five between 1900 and October of that year. The Chicago Tribune called the season a "death harvest." The game at the time was built on mass formations — packs of players driving into each other with no neutral zone and nowhere for the impact to go.

President Theodore Roosevelt, himself a supporter of the sport, summoned coaches and administrators from Harvard, Yale and Princeton to Washington on 9 October 1905 and told them to fix it.

The fix was not a safety tweak. It was a different sport.

What the 1906 rules changed

• 01The forward pass became legal, spreading players out instead of packing them in
• 02Mass formations were abolished
• 03A neutral zone was created between the two lines
• 04The first-down distance doubled to 10 yards

Fatalities fell to eleven a year in both 1906 and 1907, and injuries dropped sharply. The game did not become safe — it still isn't — but it stopped being an annual scandal.

Why it matters

Nearly everything distinctive about American football traces to that emergency. The forward pass, the reason the ball is shaped the way it is, the reason the field has an end zone, the ten yards you need for a first down: all of it comes from a rules committee trying to stop players dying, not from anyone designing a better game.