On Tuesday, The New York Times followed the Tribune with this headline: "Abolition of Football or Immediate Reforms -- College Presidents Denounce Game and Demand Change -- Crisis of Sport at Hand."

Wednesday's Times headline: "Football Is Abolished by Columbia Committee -- Game Too Dangerous and Demoralizing, Say Faculty."

The controversy had allowed football-wary administrators to outflank the reluctant football establishment of what would later be called the Ivy League. NYU Chancellor Henry MacCracken called a meeting of schools NYU competed against. That led to additional meetings and expansion of the Rules Committee. Deliberations in early 1906 legalizing the forward pass starting that fall.

Football fatalities were frequently attributed not to the lack of helmets (which were not actually mandated until 1939), but to tactics called "mass play" -- in which multiple players, sometimes including guards or tackles, were stationed behind the line and put in motion in front of a running back. The idea was to concentrate as much force as possible on would-be tacklers. The forward pass, it was hoped, plus a new rule requiring teams to get 10 rather than five yards on three downs (later changed to four), would "open" play and diminish injuries.

The new pass was especially risky because if it fell untouched, according to the rule, the other team got the ball.

East Coast schools initially disdained it and used it sparingly. But Coach Eddie Cochems of St. Louis University embraced it, leading the local Globe-Democrat by the end of the 1906 season to call it St. Louis' "famous forward pass."

The play was finally popularized in the East, when a Notre Dame receiver named Knute Rockne put on a dazzling pass-catching display in defeating Army at West Point in 1913.

But Rockne himself graciously pointed to Cochems as father of the modern passing offense. "As with most revolutionary movements in established practice, the forward pass came in quietly, almost obscurely," Rockne wrote in a 1930 Colliers article, excerpted in Allison Danzig's "Oh, How They Played the Game." "Eddie Cochems, coach at St. Louis University circa 1907 (1906), enrolled a few boys with hands like steam shovels who could toss a football just as easily and almost as far as they could throw a baseball. St. Louis played and defeated several big teams -- using the forward pass. One would have thought that so effective a play would be instantly copied and become the vogue. The East, however, had not learned much or cared much about Mid-West and Western football; indeed, the East hardly knew that football existed beyond the Alleghenies."

So it was with football -- as with many other American things -- that the seat of ingenuity moved West.