Gradually these editorials endorsed the outright abolition of football. Leading the movement was Charles William Eliot, the president of Harvard. He repeatedly criticized football in annual reports starting in 1903, arguing that “worse preparation for the real struggles and contests of life can hardly be imagined.” He found the game a lawless, brutal and corrupting distraction.

Despite being the school’s president, Eliot could not outlaw football at Harvard, as alumni and students controlled the athletic committee and voted annually to continue playing. But with every death and maiming, more of the public began to agree with Eliot. Columbia, Duke, Northwestern and other schools actually canceled football after the deadly 1905 season. Stanford and the University of California switched to the tamer sport of rugby.

There are many stories about why Roosevelt decided to intervene. Some historians argue he was motivated by a gruesome newspaper photo of Robert “Tiny” Maxwell, a Swarthmore College standout (for whom the Maxwell Award, a precursor to the Heisman, would later be named) who was beaten beyond recognition during a game with the University of Pennsylvania. Others point to a head injury to his own son, Teddy Roosevelt Jr., during a Harvard practice. And Roosevelt’s peripatetic nature, his need to immerse himself in virtually all facets of American life, could explain his involvement.

But Miller argues that Roosevelt actually wanted to save the game from abolitionists like Eliot, whom he knew from his Harvard days. “Roosevelt recognized that the sport had a problem with violence,” Miller said. “He wanted to preserve what was good about the game but make it safer for the players.”

On Oct. 9, 1905, Roosevelt invited the coaches of the three biggest college programs in the country, Harvard, Yale and Princeton, to the White House for an extraordinary private meeting. Again the historical accounts diverge. Some say Roosevelt gave the coaches an ultimatum: Change the game or I’ll abolish it by executive order. But Miller says that Roosevelt, characteristically, spoke softly, merely asking the leaders to save the sport by reducing the violence in whatever manner they could figure out among themselves.

Given the fact that Roosevelt elevated the issue to the level of a presidential meeting, however, his implication was clear: It was time to fix football. “He didn’t have to say anything like a read-between-the-lines threat,” Miller says. “He wanted to nudge them in a direction.”

Walter Camp, the Yale coach at the time, known as “The Father of American Football” for his work in developing the game, dismissed Roosevelt’s appeal. But Bill Reid, Harvard’s coach, took it seriously, perhaps because his university’s president wanted to ban the game. Reid organized a new rulemaking committee to rival an older one controlled by Camp, and within a few months, the Intercollegiate Athletic Association (the forerunner to the NCAA) had hammered out 19 new rules for the game. The IAA guidelines doubled the yardage needed for a first down from five yards to 10, which made plunging down the field like a tank a less successful endeavor; created a neutral zone between the two sides of the line of scrimmage; banned the flying wedge by requiring six men on the line; and established the forward pass to spread the field, a change that gradually revolutionized the game.

Reid persuaded Camp to comply by threatening to cancel Harvard’s football program if Yale didn’t agree to the new rules. Though Camp hated the passing game (he preferred the rules he originally developed), he had no choice but to agree; the Harvard-Yale game was extremely popular, and Camp didn’t want to be responsible for ending it. Conditions for football slowly improved over the ensuing decades, as more rules emphasizing player safety were added.

But thanks to improvements in the science around concussions, we now know that these safety considerations have not fully sanitized the game. And the same debates we saw in 1905 roil today, with much of the same rhetoric.

Football has been willing to make changes in the name of safety—late-hit penalties to protect the quarterback, for example, or the NFL moving kickoffs to the 35 yard-line, creating more touchbacks and effectively taking kickoff returns, one of the most dangerous plays, out of the game. But given the science, it’s increasingly difficult to figure out how to legislate out the brutality. On every down, players pound into one another with a force that resembles a low-speed car crash. And these sub-concussive hits build up over time, causing significant damage even to those who show no signs of concussions.

Because of the high profile of modern sports, politicians continue to grandstand about them, from hearings on steroids in baseball or the college football championship playoff to active legislation written to deal with domestic violence issues or even change the Washington football team’s name. Nobody has yet pulled a Roosevelt and brought football’s top people together to encourage change. “The example of Roosevelt,” Miller says, “shows that a skillful political leader with a deft touch can make a real difference.” Maybe that doesn’t have to be President Obama—he’s got plenty of other things to worry about—but somebody has to do it.

History shows us that football has the capacity to renew itself. But now it’s less a sport and more a business, and the NFL is unlikely to alter the game, the cornerstone of its wildly successful business model, absent threats to its bottom line. Recent statements by sponsors expressing concern over how the league has handled recent crises suggest that this type of financial pressure is beginning. And let’s hope it is, because while we can’t exactly expect the president to get involved this time, without some sort of intervention, the league is headed down a path that will cause needless suffering, alienate the public and ultimately end up destroying the game that America has come to love.