How Teddy Roosevelt Ended Unfettered Football and Saved the Game

I was at the College Football Hall of Fame in South Bend this weekend. I learned many fascinating things about the history of football, including the fact that the first football game was played between Rutgers and Princeton in New Brunswick, NJ, five minutes from where I grew up. Incidentally, Rutgers won that game (that would be the last game they ever won, or so it seems).

But two facts stuck out among everything else. First, there is no tradition of football, outside of change. The game has changed a countless number of times. The shape of the ball has changed, the number of people who play has changed, how many yards you need for a first down has changed (Fun trick question: How many yards did you need for a first down when the game first started? None, you just had to keep possession; teams were known to sit on the ball for a whole half), the tackling and blocking rules have changed and the forward pass itself is a change to the rules.

Two conclusions flow from that for me. 1. College football should definitely have a playoff system. Any argument based on football tradition is absolute nonsense. The real football tradition is constant change. 2. Most arguments for tradition over change have no sense of history. Change makes the world go around.

The second important fact I got from my visit to the Hall of Fame was that strict rules and regulations were needed to save football. In 1905, the game had grown increasingly violent (it was always violent, but 18 people died that year alone with only a tiny fraction of the teams we have now). Some argued that lack of regulations made football what it was. That excessive rule making would kill off the game. In essence, they argued for unfettered football.

But instead of unfettered football, what you were getting instead was a bogged down game that was so chaotic that it was turning people off and killing the sport (and literally, its players). That's when Teddy Roosevelt stepped in. He called in the Big Three of the time -- Harvard, Yale and Princeton. He told them that they had to regulate the game, create more rules to make it less violent and chaotic and bring order to the sport.

At first, people resisted. But after the new rules were put into place, the game absolutely flourished. It turns out you need rules for a game to work. Now, I fear I am going to take this analogy too far, but it seems to me that we have the same problem with the free markets today. Some argue that unfettered markets will regulate themselves, but that is not natural. Any game will be pushed to the limit of its rules and people will naturally try to get away with as much as possible.

In order for capitalism to thrive -- like the other great American tradition, football -- it has to be regulated and sensible rules have to be put into place. These rules don't hurt the game, they are essential to it. Without rules, you have anarchy. Smart rules and regulations help set the boundaries for a good, clean game.

We shouldn't be afraid to do now what Roosevelt did back then -- step in, set clear guidelines and then let the games begin. Football took off after it got cleaned up and regulated. The free markets can do the same if everyone is given fair rules to play by.

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Comments

[richardwb]

Capitalism is a great American tradition?

Have you looked around?

[shogunmarcus]

Let me get this straight Cenk....Yo­u grew up 5 minutes away from Rutgers and didn't know that we won the 1st ever intercollegiate football game against Princeton? And since you clearly haven't been following our progress (and I openly acknowledge the historical futility of the program) we've turned it around over the past 4 years. 4 straight winning seasons and 4 straight bowl appearances with 3 straight bowl victories. I know where you're coming from with the RU football dig (i.e. the last game they ever won) but I'm sure you want to be perceived as well informed. RU football has been ranked as high as #7 in the nation over the past few years. Just an FYI. If you're a local boy, try to show some RU awareness and pride even though it's clearly not your alma mater.

[vimmryan]

Teddy Roosevelt has been one of my favorite historical figures for some time now, great article Cenk.

[WashingtonEd]

Cenk, you are right.

Now comes the tough part. What will the rules be? Who will enforce them? Will we tolerate the "enforcers" being possibly outside the sovereignty of this country.

Football rules, and the bodies enforcing them, are far from perfect, but we live with them because there is something about the roughest of games that nevertheless is subservient to our desire for order and some fairness. It's not going to be as easy to keep economic interests within bounds. Notice we still have wars. Today in this country we have lots of rules, but those who can pay to live outside them do so comfortably.

[SteveFilson]

Cenk, the same goes for Chicago Cutthroat, a free-for-all basketball game with no rules. The scores barely break out of single digits. But put some referees and rules on the court and voila! Hi scores and happy fans.

[LadyFriend]

Way to hit the nail on the head, Cenk....as usual!

[ihavenobias]

Another excellent piece.

[smitallica]

Nice analysis, Cenk.
The market, at its most basic level, runs on greed. Any enterprise founded on greed and human desire can never "regulate itself." Because there is always somebody greedier.

[toosinbeymen]

Exactly right, Cenk. Those that have "faith" in "the free market" are really selling snake oil. What they want is to be given free rein for schenanigans. To play basketball using jungle rules and not make money thru good business practices but rather thru trickery and fraud. But then it's not fraud if there are no rules.

[tiggerpornstar]

In the 19Th century, the piano was the entertainment center. It is replaced by the radio. Up until the 1950's, the American sportsman could equally refer to Arnold Palmer (a cheater) a legend like Joey D or more of a Hemingwayesque sports fisherman. Sports Illustrated ran covers of this sort. Football, baseball and basketball have all really emerged as American inventions in the late 19Th and 20Th century. In the 18Th century, one would think of fencing and dueling as perhaps having similar cultural significance relative to their society. Why shouldn't football and baseball and basketball become quaint reminders of the past the way some people still fence?
As long as people fill the stands, buy the merchandise, and as long as the TV beer truck advertising model maintains its viability, if there's money to be made, games will be played. One can imagine a world in which cock fighting and dog fighting and boxing become obsolete, with professional wrestling and movies about fightclubs, like "Fightclub", filling in the void, but one wonders if it merely pushes it further underground. I think there is a corollary here about regulation, that when you regulate things too much it merely creates another system much worse and completely unregulated.

[tiggerpornstar]

During the past century we've seen the rise of sports franchises. Put this in a larger context, you can look at Ford in the same breath as the Yankees, the NY Giants, the Steelers, as corporations that were family owned at some level. Corporate America runs counter to this trend; there is something to be said for the fact that we cling to tradition. Anti-corporate types crusade against the concept of corporate ownership, NASCAR the worst example, but Enron, sky boxes and the use of taxpayer dollars to build ever-larger stadiums all part of the same blight. Wrigley Field, ivy and all, sits there as the biggest contradiction, the best reminder of the past time and yet Wrigley Field has always been about corporate ownership and branding.
Baseball started as a card game. A group of lawyers in midtown Manhattan regularly attended a gentleman's club. They realized they were no longer part of the generation x 18-35 demo, were moving into the Viagra do-you-keep-going crowd, and wanted to get a bit of a workout. Nothing too strenuous, they were after all, men of leisure. They took their card games to an empty lot- lot's in Manhattan at the time measured a standard distance, and decided on 42 long steps between the bases, 90 feet- and the games were played to... 21. The rules: first and foremost was that all players were gentleman and had to be there on time, punctuality was important.
(Cont.)