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At the time, before the forward pass, football consisted almost entirely of men bashing one another as the ball was carried, foot by foot, down the field. There were no shock-absorbing pads or faceguards: nearly every game produced broken ribs, noses and limbs. Brutal moves were almost never penalized, including elbows to the face and the infamous “clothesline” — one player slamming his arm into another’s neck.

In the fall of 1905, at least 18 players died during or immediately after football games — and there were far fewer contests than now. Newspaper readers across the country were shocked by a photograph of the swollen, bloodied face of a college football star leaving the field. In a sign of how much times have changed, the player in the photo, Robert W. Maxwell, was a 240-pound guard from Swarthmore renowned for his size; today Swarthmore doesn’t even have a team, and a lineman of Mr. Maxwell’s stature would be dwarfed on the field.

Football was corrupting education, too. At the time, college football was the heart of the sport, and already a magnet for school resources. The University of Wisconsin faculty had just passed a resolution demanding the school drop football, which it said had become “a business supported by levies on the public.”

Meanwhile, ringers — large, talented nonstudents, wearing jersey numbers listed for actual students — were commonplace, though using them was against the rules. Football sleaze even made it into the movies, eventually playing a significant role in the plot of the Marx Brothers film “Horse Feathers.”

Roosevelt, an exponent of “the strenuous life,” loved football, for its machismo and for bringing a manly man activity to college campuses. But he knew the sport was becoming socially harmful and feared that it might end up outlawed.

The president had no statutory authority over athletics, but he did have the bully pulpit of his office, and he called the presidents of the powerhouse football colleges to the White House. (In another sign of changing times, the men he invited came from Harvard, Yale and Princeton.)

Roosevelt got the college leaders to agree to rule changes to address brutality and to legalize the forward pass, which added grace to the sport while reducing all-out collisions. The presidential initiative also played a role in the 1906 founding of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, which is today condemned as a guardian of the status quo but was originally conceived as a reform organization.