![]() ![]() Even President Theodore Roosevelt, hardly a pantywaist, demanded that reforms be made. By 1905 the public outcry against the game's brutality was so great that several colleges (including Columbia, the third school to take up the sport) banned football, and others threatened to do so. The rules changes of the 1890s led to only a brief decrease in the rate of injury and death on the playing field. ![]() ![]() Despite rapidly growing popularity, college football was in serious trouble in the early twentieth century. But the sport really was becoming "big time" by 1903, when Harvard unveiled the first large concrete stadium designed specifically for football. In 1967 this rule was further modified to require numbering according to position, with offensive players ineligible to receive forward passes assigned numbers in the 50-79 range. Although the first All-America team was named in 1889, numbers to identify individual players were not recommended until 1915, and it wasn't until 1937 that numerals were required on both the front and back of game jerseys. The nineteenth century game was primarily one of brute force. With these changes the game spread more rapidly, and some 250 colleges were participating by the beginning of the twentieth century. The first-down rule of 1882 required the marking of yard lines on the field and led to the term gridiron. Still, the sport did not really begin to resemble the modern game until former Yale player Walter Camp revised the rules in the early 1880s: limit players to 11 on a side, establishing a scrimmage system for putting the ball in play, and he instituted a system of downs for advancing the ball, requiring a team to make 5 yards in 3 downs (the current system of 4 downs to make 10 yards was not adopted until 1912). In 1876 a crossbar was added to the goal posts at a height of 10 feet (in effect to the present day), the field was reduced to nearly modern dimensions, and the number of players on each side was lowered to 15. The sport grew slowly at first with Columbia, Yale, Harvard, and Stevens Tech fielding teams by 1875. Rutgers beat Princeton 6 goals to 4, using a soccer-style round ball, played on a huge field (120 yards long and 75 yards wide) with 25 players on each side. The first intercollegiate football contest was played on November 6th, 1869, at New Brunswick, New Jersey. Introduction: A Brief History of College Football Octoby Robert M. ![]()
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