As we head into the last few weeks of the regular season in college football - and the anticipation of bowl season grows - there is a lot of rumbling about reforming the BCS system. For the past few years, complaining about the BCS has become an annual sport in and of itself. However, if it weren't for the Ivy League in 1905 there might not be a BCS to complain about because college football might not exist (at least in its current format).

In 1906, the entity that will become the NCAA will be created to regulate/reform college football. Reading the 1905 NYT has been interesting in this particular area - in 1905 there were numerous deaths, severe injuries, riots, and overall bad behavior, in college football. In the same year, attendance figures reached all-time highs and the schools are discovering that there is a lot of money in big-time college football.

The Nov. 27, 1905 NYT has a story about football reform, with the following opening paragraph:

Following the suggestion of President Roosevelt for uniform eligibility rules in college athletics and for the elimination of unnecessary roughness, brutality, and foul play in the American game of football, the University of Pennsylvania has taken the initiative for the suggested reforms, and has addressed a circular letter on the subject to the heads of all universities, colleges, private schools, and other institutions in the United States interested in athletics.

The story includes the sent to the university presidents. In essence, it describes the major areas the NCAA will eventually codify:

Prof. Hollis of Harvard has expressed the same thought. In his opinion the backbone of college regulation of athletics rests in three rules.

1. A definition of professionalism.
2. A rule which should require all members of athletic teams to be genuine students of the college which they represent, and to be satisfactory in their studies.
3. A rule to prevent the procurement of good players from other colleges by social or money inducements.

As amazing as it sounds, the Byzantine rules and regulations that the NCAA has passed over the years focus on these three basic issues. In a flash of naivete, however, the folks at Penn asked for voluntary adoption of the regulations they propose:

It [the committee] believes that they [the enclosed rules] will provide for all the exigencies which have hitherto arisen or that may arise, and if interpreted and accepted in the broad spirit by which was appropriately described by President Roosevelt as a "gentleman's agreement" will do away with the evils which have undoubtedly menaced inter-collegiate athletics, and will promote the best interests of clean, gentlemanly amateur sport.

The voluntary adoption of these rules proved difficult to enforce, requiring the NCAA to put some teeth in their enforcement efforts in the late 1940s and into the early 1950s.

Nevertheless, without Penn and other Ivy League schools, there is a high probability that college football could have been banned in the early 1900s and we wouldn't have the BCS to gripe about. While the Ivy League was relegated to Division I-AA status in 1981, fans of college football owe a nod of thanks to these schools for saving the game in its first series of crises.