Jasper County Democrat, Volume 8, Number 30, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 28 October 1905 — IS FOOTBALL DOOMED? . [ARTICLE]

IS FOOTBALL DOOMED? .

Here are recent statements of several of the presidents of leading colleges on the matter of modern football: “American football, as it is played today, will have to go, or it will have to be more modified than it ever has been.”—President Benjamin Ide Wheeler to the University of California. “Brutality and unnecessary roughness shall cease in football played by Harvard teams *or that football itself shall be eliminated from the athletic curriculum of the varsity.”—President Eliot, of Harvard. “I am not opposed to football as a game, though I take little personal interest in it. I do think, however, that football is peculiarly open to a number of unfair practices which I regard as a very reprehensible.”—President Rewsen, Johns Hopkins University. “The professional coach must go. That is the only cure for the evils from which college athletics are now suffering. The teams should be the guests of the institutions they visit, without such displays of hostilities and unfair rooting as we generally see. lam convinced that football at present makes high scholarship impossible.”—Prof. Seaman, De Pauw University.