In the early days, college football was a game of life-and-death. How the forward pass changed all that.

College football is an immensely popular sport today, and it's even gaining on the NFL in popularity according to recent polls. But there was a time when the sport was on the verge of being banned because of the brutality that came along with it.

In 1905, there were 19 deaths of young men on college football fields. The game was basically a large mass of players slamming into each other, mainly due to the fact that there was no line of scrimmage, there were no helmets, and first downs were only five yards long (although there were just three downs), so it made sense to just run the ball directly at the other team with maximum force on every play.

Perhaps the most dangerous play of all was the "mass play," where a wall of players (in many cases linemen) grouped together and smashed into other players like a battering ram. Many times, it got so bad that a player would drag a tackled and at times unconscious teammate across the field of play.

Opponents of the sport cried out from colleges across the nation, calling for either major changes or the abolition of the game altogether.

"As an institution, it was a boy-killing, man-mutilating, money-making, education-prostituting, gladitorial sport," said Shaller Mathews, dean of the University of Chicago Divinity School about the game in those dark days.

Colleges responded by adopting a new set of rules designed to save lives as well as the game itself. The line of scrimmage was established, allowing for a lower level overall chaos and giving more structure to the game.

The forward pass would turn out to be the biggest change, but it took a little while longer to catch on among the top teams because of the fact that an incompletion resulted in a turnover.

But that 1906 season turned out to be a magical one for St. Louis, as they used the forward pass to defeat bigger, stronger, teams that still played the older style of smash-mouth football all the time.

The amount of yards required to gain a first down was also doubled to 10 in 1906, and once teams started stopping the ground game, other schools began to emulate St. Louis' aerial attack.

The modern game of football had finally arrived, and the sport is now much safer because of these changes.

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JEH45 said:

	Nick: I probably would have researched some football factoid today, but I fished the beach instead.
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September 16, 2007
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ItOffishul said:

	good deal, i worked and watched the lions. are u serious or being facetious though? i cant tell heheh. go bucks, thanks for getting the big ten some kind of credibility
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September 16, 2007
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Lloyds Apple said:

	Interesting read man. 19 deaths is insane, which backs my theory that those opposed to Ultimate Fighting need to wake up. Football, boxing, ect...all violent sports. Not to mention steroid driven baseball, pro wrestling (WWF) and so on. Also, smaller teams are still beating large schools with the forward pass. Some things never change.
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September 17, 2007
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