The Forward Pass Was Legalized to Stop Football From Killing People

In 1905, the Chicago Tribune counted 19 dead and 159 seriously injured in college football. The game was a wedge of bodies — flying-V mass formations, no helmets to speak of, and runners dragged forward by their teammates' belts. Theodore Roosevelt, whose son played for Harvard, summoned coaches from Harvard, Yale, and Princeton to the White House and told them to reform the sport before it was abolished.

The Intercollegiate Athletic Association — the body that became the NCAA — held its rules meeting through the winter of 1906. The fight was over what would replace the wedge. Walter Camp, the Yale man who had shaped American football, resisted. John Heisman, then coaching Georgia Tech, had been arguing for three years that football needed a pass. He went around Camp, recruited committee members John Bell and Paul Dashiell, and on April 6, 1906, the forward pass became legal.

Barely. The first version of the rule was hedged into near-uselessness. Only the two ends on the line were eligible receivers. A pass couldn't be thrown within five yards of the sideline. An incomplete pass turned the ball over. The point was to spread defenders out, not to open the air.

On September 5, 1906, in Saint Louis University's season opener against Carroll College, Bradbury Robinson dropped back and threw football's first legal forward pass. It hit the ground untouched, and Saint Louis lost possession. Later in the game, Robinson connected with Jack Schneider for a 20-yard touchdown. Saint Louis finished 11-0, outscoring opponents 407-11.

The pass took years to catch on. Eastern coaches treated it as a gimmick until 1913, when a Notre Dame team nobody had heard of beat Army by throwing it 17 times. Roosevelt's emergency rule had quietly become the sport.