The Big Scrum: How Teddy Roosevelt Saved Football

A nice and easy read for the football fan

I suck at book reviews but my roommate is an author and he loves reading reviews for his book, so I figured John Miller might like it too. There are so many books on the Progressive Era of the United States, but only a few on how it influenced America's #1 sport. On page 78 there's a typo that reads: "The Princeton-Yale game in 1778 drew four thousand spectators" Should read 1878 not 1778. But I digress. Miller gives a year by year breakdown of the history of football which he describes as a slow evolution from its days as essentially a game of soccer, to a hybrid of rugby and soccer, and its rules amendments that divorced it from Rugby. Goes heavily into detail about Roosevelt's influence with Walter Camp's football committee and his condemnation of progressives who wanted to legislate the sport out of existence. Their attempts would fail but Miller makes a connection to the pressure they put on the sport to either change its ways (read about the 1905 season) or else it will lose the support of the public. Would recommend this book to anyone. Read more