1906 college football season

1906 IAAUS football season
St. Louis Post-Dispatch photograph of Brad Robinson, who threw the first legal forward pass on September 5.
Total # of teams	64
Champions	Princeton Tigers Yale Bulldogs
Heisman	Not awarded until 1935
← 1905 College football seasons 1907 →

The 1906 IAAUS football season was the first played under the authority of the IAAUS (now the NCAA) and the first in which the forward pass was permitted. Although there was no clear cut national championship, there were two teams that had won all nine of their games as the 1906 season drew to a close, the Princeton Tigers and the Yale Bulldogs, and on November 17, 1906, they played to a 0-0 tie. St. Louis University finished at 11-0-0. The Helms Athletic Foundation, founded in 1936, declared retroactively that Princeton had been the best college football team of 1906. Other selectors recognized Yale as the national champions for 1906.

Although his nearsightedness kept him off the Harvard varsity squad, Theodore Roosevelt was a vocal exponent of football’s contribution to the “strenuous life,” both on and off the field. He helped revive the annual Harvard-Yale football series after it had been canceled for two years following the violent 1894 clash that was deemed “the bloodbath at Hampden Park.” His belief that the football field was a proving ground for the battlefield was validated by the performance of his fellow Rough Riders who were former football standouts. “In life, as in a football game,” he wrote, “the principle to follow is: Hit the line hard; don’t foul and don’t shirk, but hit the line hard!” In 1903, the president told an audience, “I believe in rough games and in rough, manly sports. I do not feel any particular sympathy for the person who gets battered about a good deal so long as it is not fatal.” He summoned the head coaches and representatives of the premier collegiate powers—Harvard, Yale and Princeton—to the White House on October 9, 1905. Roosevelt urged them to curb excessive violence and make an example of fair play for the rest of the country. The schools released a statement condemning brutality and pledging to keep the game clean.

Following the 1905 season, Stanford and California switched to rugby while Columbia, Northwestern and Duke dropped football. Harvard president Charles Eliot, who considered football “more brutalizing than prizefighting, cockfighting or bullfighting,” warned that Harvard could be next, a move that could have been a crushing blow to the college game. Roosevelt wrote in a letter to a friend that he would not let Eliot “emasculate football,” and that he hoped to “minimize the danger” without football having to be played “on too ladylike a basis.” Roosevelt again used his bully pulpit. He urged for radical rule changes, and he invited other school leaders to the White House in the off-season.