The 1905 Crisis and the Birth of the NCAA

By 4Football Staff · September 24, 2026 · 10 min read

After a brutal 1905 season, colleges debated abolishing football. A White House meeting and a convention of schools saved the game and created the body now called the NCAA.

In the fall of 1905, a United States president called the coaches of the country's most famous football programs to the White House. Theodore Roosevelt was a fan of tough sports and believed in strenuous living, so he was not the sort of leader who wanted to ban football. But he had read the newspapers, and he had a son playing the game at Harvard. What he was hearing alarmed him.

Within a few months, the colleges had reorganized their rules process, created a new national body, changed the playing rules in ways that opened the game up, and set in motion a series of reforms that reshaped the sport. That organization began as the Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States and, in 1910, took the name the National Collegiate Athletic Association, or NCAA.

This article explains why football was in trouble, who stepped in, what the reformers changed, and what the episode did and did not fix. It follows on from the work of Walter Camp and the rule makers of the 1880s, because the crisis was the result of the game they had built.

A dangerous game by design

To understand 1905, you need to picture how the game was played. The 1880s rules had produced downs, a line of scrimmage and tackling below the waist. Teams reacted by looking for ways to advance the ball with brute force, since the forward pass did not yet exist and the rules required a team to gain only a short distance to keep the ball.

The answer in many cases was mass play: a ball carrier surrounded by teammates who pushed, pulled and shoved him forward. The best-known version was the flying wedge, a formation in which a group of players ran at speed in a V shape toward the defense. It had alarmed critics in the early 1890s, and the rules limited it in 1894. But the underlying approach, relying on bunched players to gain a few yards, stayed central to the game through the next decade.

Several other features of the era made injuries worse.

• Little protective equipment. Players wore some padding and leather headgear, but equipment was not standardized, and many players wore very little. The long history of helmets is told in the article on the evolution of the football helmet.
• A crowded line. Few rules limited how many players could be bunched together or where they could line up.
• Rules that rewarded roughness. Because the other team could only be stopped by tackling or blocking, and because the game had no open passing to stretch the defense, a team could win by overpowering the other side physically.
• Unclear medical care. There was no organized system for evaluating injuries on the sideline, and players often continued after being hurt.

None of this was a secret. Critics had been complaining for years, and at least one state legislature had gotten involved. In 1897, after a University of Georgia player died following a game, the Georgia legislature passed a bill to ban the sport in the state. The governor vetoed it, in part after the player's mother asked that football not be outlawed in her son's name. That episode shows that the debate over the game's brutality did not begin in 1905.

The critics

Opposition to football was not limited to newspaper columns. Several leading university presidents had long been skeptical. Charles W. Eliot, Harvard's president for decades, was one of the most prominent critics, and his objections were both moral and practical: he thought the game encouraged violence and distracted students from their studies.

Supporters had arguments of their own. They said football built courage and teamwork, drew students and alumni closer to their schools and gave young men a chance to test themselves. Roosevelt, who admired physical toughness, belonged to this camp. He wanted to keep the game but wanted it cleaned up.

By 1905 each side had evidence to point at. Critics had a growing list of injuries and a series of deaths reported in newspapers. Supporters had the game's popularity and the argument that safer rules could solve the problem without abolishing the sport.

The season of 1905

During the 1905 season, newspapers carried repeated stories of players who were seriously hurt or killed. A tally published by a Chicago newspaper at the end of the season, widely quoted at the time, counted 18 deaths and a much larger number of serious injuries across the country. That figure is a newspaper count, not an official statistic, and historians treat it as a rough indication rather than a precise total. Some counted the deaths differently, since many of the players were from high schools and amateur clubs rather than colleges, and the definition of football-related death was not standardized.

What matters for the story is that these reports, and a few vivid images in the press, changed public opinion. The reported death of a college player in a game involving a New York school, and photographs published in newspapers of players piled on top of each other, kept the issue in front of readers. By the end of the autumn, some colleges had moved to drop the sport. Columbia University, for example, suspended its program after the 1905 season, and other schools considered similar steps. The possibility that major colleges would abandon football was real.

The White House meeting

In October 1905, Roosevelt invited representatives of Harvard, Yale and Princeton, including Camp, to the White House. He had no authority to change football's rules, and he did not try to. What he did was use his position to push the schools toward cooperation. The meeting ended with a public statement from the participants in which they committed to playing within both the letter and the spirit of the rules.

This was a mostly symbolic result, and critics at the time noted that a promise to be more sportsmanlike did not alter the underlying design of the game. But it signaled that the issue had reached the highest level of government, and it increased pressure on the colleges to do something more concrete. Historians usually describe Roosevelt's role as that of a convener who gave reform momentum, not as the author of the rule changes that followed.

The convention of schools

The decisive step came from outside the circle of big eastern programs. Henry MacCracken, chancellor of New York University, called a meeting of representatives from a number of colleges in New York in early December 1905. Thirteen institutions are usually listed as attending the first gathering. Participants agreed that the game needed reform and called a larger convention for the end of the month.

On December 28, 1905, representatives of dozens of schools met in New York and formed an association to govern intercollegiate athletics. Sixty-two institutions are usually listed as signing on to the new body, which was called the Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States. Its constitution was approved in the spring of 1906. In 1910 it changed its name to the National Collegiate Athletic Association.

At the same time, there were two separate groups claiming authority over the rules. One was the existing rules committee, long dominated by a few eastern schools, and the other was a new committee formed by the larger convention. For a short while it was unclear which would prevail. In early 1906, the two groups merged into a single football rules committee, which gave the new association's members a say in writing the rules.

Why does that matter? Because it shifted football's governance from a small circle of elite schools to a broader group. The rules process became more representative, and a body now existed that could address problems across all member colleges.

The 1906 rule changes

The newly combined committee adopted a set of changes for the 1906 season. Not every detail is told the same way in every source, so use this table as a summary of the most commonly cited changes and check a specialist history if you need an exact rule.

The forward pass is the best-known item on the list, and its history deserves its own treatment in the article on how the forward pass became legal. In 1906, though, it was introduced with so many limits that it changed the game only gradually.

How the rules process works today

One lasting result of the winter of 1905 is the habit of keeping a standing rules committee. The NCAA still has a committee that proposes changes to the college football rule book, and it meets on a regular schedule rather than waiting for a crisis. Proposals go through a review before they take effect, which is why a change you hear about in the winter usually shows up in the next season. High school football works on a different model, with the National Federation of State High School Associations publishing a rule book that state associations adopt, sometimes with their own changes, and the NFL's rules are set by its own club owners. The comparison is useful when you wonder why the same play can be legal at one level and penalized at another.

That committee structure is the part of the 1905 settlement that has aged best. The specific rules of 1906 have been rewritten many times over, but the idea that a representative group reviews injuries, hears complaints and adjusts the rules continues.

Did it work?

Not immediately. The 1906 changes did not make football safe, and the following years brought more injuries and deaths. The 1909 season was especially troubling, including the death of a cadet at the United States Military Academy after a game, which renewed calls for reform.

Rule makers responded again in 1910, with changes that are often cited as the second wave of the reform movement. Those changes included dividing the game into four quarters instead of two halves and increasing the number of players required on the offensive line to seven, and they restricted some of the most dangerous forms of interlocking blocking. Later decades brought still more changes, from the requirement of better equipment to rules protecting vulnerable players. A broader look at that long process is in the article on a century of safety rules in football.

The honest summary is that the 1905 reforms did two things well and one thing partially. They kept college football alive. They created a governing body that could debate rules for many schools at once. And they started to shift the style of play away from the worst of the mass formations, though it took years.

What the NCAA became

The association founded in the winter of 1905 was initially a rule-making and discussion body, with limited powers. Over the following decades its work expanded to include championships, eligibility rules and enforcement. Today the NCAA is a large membership organization that oversees college sports at several levels, and it is the source of many of the rules that affect college football players. Football at the highest level is also shaped by athletic conferences, which hold a great deal of practical power, so the NCAA is one authority among several.

The relationship between college football and its governing body has often been tense, with debates over money, athlete compensation and who should regulate what. Those are modern questions, and they have their own articles on this site. What is useful here is the origin: the NCAA was created because the schools needed a shared way to deal with a problem none of them could solve alone.

Common misunderstandings

• "Roosevelt banned dangerous plays." He did not have the authority to do so. He pushed the schools to act, and the schools changed the rules.
• "The forward pass was invented to make football safe." It was one part of a package of changes. Its introduction was motivated by the desire to open the game, but passing was heavily restricted at first and did not transform play right away.
• "Football was nearly abolished." Some schools did suspend their programs and some leaders called for abolition, so the threat was real. Most major programs continued, and the reforms won broad support.
• "The 18 deaths figure is an official count." It was a newspaper tally. Treat it as an indicator of how the public saw the season.
• "The NCAA has always looked like it does now." For decades it was a small body with limited authority.

Where to see the legacy

Almost every structure in today's college game traces back to the reform era. The idea that schools must agree on a common rule book, that officials enforce penalties for dangerous play and that a national organization sets standards all came out of the winter of 1905 to 1906. You can follow current games and results on our scores page, browse programs on the college page, and see how teams stand on the rankings page.

What to remember

• By 1905, the heavy use of mass plays, thin equipment and few rules limiting contact had made football dangerous, and critics had been speaking out for years.
• A widely cited newspaper tally counted 18 deaths in the 1905 season; it is a rough count, not an official statistic.
• President Roosevelt convened leaders from Harvard, Yale and Princeton, which pushed the schools toward reform but did not itself change the rules.
• NYU's chancellor called colleges together in December 1905, and 62 institutions formed the association that became the NCAA in 1910.
• The 1906 rules legalized the forward pass and changed several other elements of the game, and the 1910 reforms followed.
• The reforms preserved the sport and created a governing body, but football remained dangerous, and safety rules have continued to change ever since.