Illustration by Britt Spencer
As decades of research and a Will Smith movie have taught us, football is dangerous. Hulking athletes crash together with breathtaking force and speed, and the resulting concussions inflict lifelong damage. But today’s game is basically ballet compared to the brutal brand of football that I played as a lad in the early 20th century. Back then, we wore leather helmets and little padding. Every play was a run, which meant all 11 defenders crowding the line and piling atop the ball carrier. In 1905, 18 college football players died on the gridiron, and 159 more were seriously injured, leading to calls to outlaw the game.
That’s when President Teddy Roosevelt personally intervened, demanding that the game be continued but made safer. A committee proposed rule changes for the 1906 season. Most significant, the forward pass was legalized in an attempt to “bring about a game in which speed and real skill shall supersede so far as possible mere brute strength and force of weight,” The New York Times reported. Most football traditionalists were skeptical. In a follow-up story titled “New Football a Chaos, The Experts Declare,” the Times wrote, “There has been no team that has proved that the forward pass is anything but a doubtful, dangerous play to be used only in the last extremity.” Tell that to Tom Brady.
The New York Times wrote, “There has been no team that has proved that the forward pass is anything but a doubtful, dangerous play to be used only in the last extremity.”
The first team to prove the newspaper wrong was Saint Louis University. On September 5, 1906, SLU opened the season against Carroll College. Quarterback Bradbury Robinson attempted the first pass in history, but it fell incomplete, resulting in a turnover under the rules of the time. Later, Robinson completed a pass to Jack Schneider for a 20-yard touchdown, and SLU won 22–0. Critics argue that other teams threw passes in 1906 and that the glory went to SLU simply because it played the first game, a fluke of scheduling. That sells short SLU coach Eddie Cochems, whose pioneering use of the pass created an unstoppable offense. SLU finished 1906 with a perfect 11–0 record, outscoring its opponents 407–11 in an all-out aerial assault. As retired SLU archivist John Waide notes, that was all the more impressive because “the football was more like a rugby ball, much fatter”—and harder to throw.
Sadly, Cochem and Robinson have been largely forgotten, even here in St. Louis. (SLU disbanded its football team in the ’40s.) Neither man is in the College Football Hall of Fame, and credit for the first forward pass often goes in error to legendary Notre Dame coach Knute Rockne. But if there is a heaven, Cochems and Robinson are surely up there watching the pass-happy modern game, finding a bit more vindication in every touchdown spiral.
