The McClure’s article might have blown over, except that Needham was a friend of the “first fan,” President Theodore Roosevelt. And Roosevelt was a staunch promoter of vigorous athletics. Too small to play in college himself, he was still a football enthusiast who believed the sport built character, and his son Ted played for his alma mater, Harvard. As the fervent cry to ban football rang out in response to Needham’s exposé, Roosevelt took to his bully pulpit. Delivering Harvard’s 1905 commencement speech, he railed at football’s dark side.

“I do not mind in the least that they are rough games, or that those who take part in them are occasionally injured,” the president said. However, he continued, “brutality in playing a game should awaken the heartiest and most plainly shown contempt for the player guilty of it, especially if this brutality is coupled with a low cunning in committing it without getting caught by the umpire.”

Roosevelt said he hoped that the schools would address the issue without killing the game. But with a rash of head and spinal injuries in the 1905 season, some of them fatal, the drumbeat against the sport grew louder. When Charles Eliot, the president of Harvard, argued that it should be abolished, Roosevelt was moved to act. As this newspaper editorialized, Roosevelt “took up another question of vital interest to the American people: he started a campaign of reform of football.”

In October 1905, the president summoned to the White House six leaders of the college game, including Walter Camp, the influential rules-maker who has been called the father of American football. At Roosevelt’s urging, the men drew up a statement condemning brutality and disregard for the rules, and pledged that their teams would hold to it. Still, there were 18 game-related deaths in the 1905 season  though many were in semiprofessional leagues that had sprung up around the country  and the outcry against the sport continued. “I demand that football change its rules or be abolished,” Roosevelt said. “Change the game or forsake it!”

Then, in November that year, a player died in a game between New York University and Union College. The chancellor of N.Y.U., Henry MacCracken, summoned the leaders of the colleges with football teams to a conference to discuss the future of the sport. After voting to reform football rather than abolish it, this group set in motion a series of rule changes that, coming in the wake of Needham’s muckraking and Roosevelt’s prodding, would ultimately transform football.

While the next decade would see continued injuries and fatalities (peaking in 1909 with 26 reported football-related deaths), the reform movement took hold. The rules of blocking were changed to eliminate the most dangerous mass maneuvers, and a neutral zone and line of scrimmage were introduced to help officials control the game. Unsportsmanlike conduct was redefined to include kneeing, kicking and punching with locked hands. The rule requiring 10 yards for a first down was instituted. And the forward pass was legalized.

These changes, along with the gradual introduction of more effective protective gear and more stringent safeguards against “professionalism,” revolutionized the college game and eventually led to the establishment of a professional football league. The reform committee itself became, in 1906, the nucleus of the Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States, renamed the National Collegiate Athletic Association (the N.C.A.A.) in 1910.

Nevertheless, as the 2010 football season closes out with another big bucks, big bowl extravaganza, Needham’s 105-year-old conclusion still rings uncomfortably true: “Who can blame the college man for harboring the desire to win? No one. But it is more than that: to win at any cost  that is the source of the present deplorable condition of intercollegiate athletics.”