The year 1905 was marked in football by a wave of reform which swept across the country. Colleges everywhere threatened to discontinue the game, unless it were made less rough and more free from opportunities for players to be seriously injured. In the following year the Football Rules Committee, composed of representatives of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Cornell, Pennsylvania, Annapolis, and the University of Chicago, was forced by public opinion to join forces with a committee appointed by the National Intercollegiate Athletic Association to reform the sport.

This amalgamated committee of fourteen members has spent the last ten years in making football a better game. They have made the old-time "rush-line scrapping" a thing of the past by the establishment of a neutral zone between the two forward lines; they have instituted reforms in the forward pass, and in the mass play.

In recent years the committee has made few important changes, but from time to time have added features designed to insure greater safety from injuries and to lay more stress on football as a game of skill, speed, and efficiency rather than as a contest of brute strength.

The committee now feels that the game itself is clean and sportsmanlike. It realizes, however, that there have been and still are abuses of the regulations, and to this end have drawn up a code of ethics of the game.

This list of suggestions consists of guide-posts to clear playing. In all sport in general and in this one in particular ethics must play a large part in making or breaking its good name.

The action of the committee, as Dean Briggs phrased it, is "highly commendable." Strictly honorable methods are frequently lost sight of, particularly among school teams. And it is with just these teams that the "Football Code" is likely to have the greatest effect. If schoolboy players learn that unfair methods are discountenanced by lovers of the game, if they are taught clean and honest tactics instead of questionable ones, there will be less abuse on the part of "outsiders," more honesty on the part of those who play, and a higher standard in the game itself.