“It is clearly the duty of the colleges which have permitted these monstrous evils to grow up and become intense to purge themselves of such immoralities … Intercollegiate and interscholastic football ought to be prohibited until a reasonable game has been formulated.”
Those were the words of Harvard University president Charles W Eliot in 1906, a year after three college players died playing football, part of a spate of deaths that led many universities to abandon the sport and President Roosevelt to call for safety reforms in the game he loved. Sadly, Eliot’s words resonate as if written today: on 29 November, Alabama A&M linebacker Medrick Burnett Jr died from a head injury he had suffered in a game the previous month. He was just twenty years old.
