In the 1905 college football season, eighteen men were killed in college games in the United States and 159 were permanently injured.
At that time, college football players wore only light equipment.
Punching, linking arms, gouging, and kicking were all part of the action and the entire team was allowed to line up on the scrimmage line.
At least a quarter of all games ended in mob brawls.
The Reverend David Buel of Georgetown University reported that one unidentified team had been taught to "strike their opponents in certain delicate parts of the body so as to render them helpless."
When President Theodore Roosevelt's own son, Ted, broke his collar bone playing football at Harvard, Roosevelt became aware of the growing number of serious injuries and deaths occurring in collegiate football. He brought the presidents of the three major Ivy League universities, Harvard, Yale and Princeton to several meetings at the White House in October, 1905, to discuss steps to make college athletics safer. The IAAUS was created as one of the outcomes of those meetings. The IAAUS became the National Collegiate Athletic Association in 1910.
