Illini Legends, Lists and Lore: Beginnings of the Big Ten

The brutal nature of intercollegiate football in the 1890s initiated an important meeting exactly 130 years ago Saturday in Chicago.

On Jan.

11, 1895, Purdue University President James Smart invited the administrative leaders of five other Midwest universities including Andrew Draper from the University of Illinois to discuss the troubling issues of football and create policies aimed at regulating intercollegiate athletics.

Reported the Chicago Tribune in its Jan.

12, 1895, edition, Six wise men walked into a small room on the second floor of the Auditorium Hotel last night, carefully barred and bolted the door behind them, and then sat down to talk about football.

The group included Smart, Draper, Dr.

W.R.

Harper of the University of Chicago, Dr.

Henry Rogers of Northwestern University, Charles Adams of the University of Wisconsin and Cyrus Northrup of the University of Minnesota.

President James Angell of the University of Michigan was expected to attend but did not appear.

The men all objected to the brutality of football that had caused hundreds of deaths and injuries.

Wrote the Tribune reporter, They dont know the rules.

Not one of them ever stood in the line-up of a modern game and it is doubtful if any of them could tell a touchdown from the left half back.

They did not want to stop football or cripple it.

Most of them are enthusiastically in favor of it and so they are doing what they can to regulate it and get what is best out of the game.

Patching up the rules to prevent slugging and accidents was left to the experts.

It was professionalism and that sort of thing the presidents sought to do away with and to that end they adopted a set of ten commandments, which they will recommend for adoption to the institutions they represent.

The first action of the meeting was the adoption of the following resolutions which were introduced by Dr.

Smart: Resolved, that we call on the expert managers of football to so revise the rules of the game that the liability of injury should be reduced to a minimum.

Resolved, that we call upon all college and university authorities to put forth every practicable effort to prevent professionalism of every form in intercollegiate athletic games and to make every game an honorable contest of athletic skill by excluding from participation all persons who are not regularly enrolled as students.

Among the ten rules adopted by the presidents were to appoint a committee on college athletics to generally supervise all athletic members, and that all games should be played on grounds in control of one or both of the colleges participating and should be played under student management and not under the control of corporations or private individuals.

Furthermore, they group recommended that college teams should not engage in games with professional teams.

Pursuant to a recommendation of the presidents, athletic committee representatives from the Universities of Illinois, Chicago, Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Northwestern and Purdue met at Chicagos Palmer House on Feb.

8, 1896.

There the Intercollegiate Conference of Faculty Representatives more popularly known as the Western Conference and later the Big Ten Conference was founded.

Indiana and Iowa joined the league thirteen years later in 1909 and Ohio State came on board in 1912.

Michigan State gained membership in 1949, Penn State in 1990, Nebraska in 2010, then Maryland and Rutgers in 2012.

Oregon, Southern California, UCLA and Washington began conference competition this season.

Today, the University of Nebraska is the only conference member that currently does not have membership in the prestigious Association of American Universities..

This article has been shared from the original article on newsgazette, here is the link to the original article:

https://www.news-gazette.com/sports/illini-legends-lists-and-lore-beginnings-of-the-big-ten/article_2c8297a0-cf9e-11ef-9e04-736c353262ce.html