Modern football, we tend to forget, was born in a funeral parlor. The carnage was so great in the early 20th century -- 18 deaths in the 1905 college season alone -- that Teddy Roosevelt threatened to ban the sport if it didn't clean up its act. Indeed, TR probably deserved a second Nobel Peace Prize for summoning athletic bigwigs from Harvard, Yale and Princeton to the White House that year in an attempt to stop the slaughter. On their way home on the train, the dignitaries drew up an agreement in which they acknowledged that "an honorable obligation exists...
