28. 1906 Chicago Head coach: Amos Alonzo Stagg Record: 4-1

Posted on: June 17, 2024 at 22:43:41 CT

College football was becoming an increasingly popular and increasingly violent sport by the early 1900s, and after a run of fatalities in 1905, President Teddy Roosevelt, who loved the game and whose son was on the Harvard team, called for changes to make the sport a bit safer. Representatives from a number of schools came together to institute vital rule changes to stretch the game out a bit and create fewer 22-body pileups. First downs would require 10 yards instead of 5. The neutral zone was created to separate the offense and defense at the start of a play. The "flying wedge" formation was banned. The forward pass was legalized and the organization that would eventually become the NCAA was created to oversee enforcement of these new rules.

Perhaps not surprisingly, one of the sport's greatest tinkerers found immediate success. While Walter Camp created a lot of the sport's early rules -- and hated basically any and every change -- Amos Alonzo Stagg was its first real innovator. Along with coaches such as Pop Warner and Saint Louis University's Eddie Cochems, he embraced newfound passing concepts. With the Big Ten dramatically cutting down schedule sizes (and a driving rainstorm turning Chicago's big game with Minnesota into an old-school slopfest that Minnesota won 4-2), Stagg had only so many chances to show off his new ideas in 1906. But in four other games, his Maroons beat Purdue, Indiana, Illinois and Nebraska by a combined 173-13. Poor Illinois was the victim of a 63-0 blowout. Chicago would lose only twice over the next three seasons, too.