“I wish to see you boys act as good citizens in the same way I’d expect any of you to act in a football game. In other words, don’t flinch, don’t foul, and hit the line hard.”
— President Theodore Roosevelt, from a 1912 recording.
College football and the American presidency are joined at the hip. We can thank Teddy Roosevelt for that.
Four presidents have played on varsity college teams, most successfully by Gerald Ford, who played as a center and linebacker for the Michigan Wolverines when they were national champions in 1931 and 1932, and was named the team’s most valuable player in 1933. And for nearly a century presidents have been attending games with great fanfare, including President Donald Trump, who will be attending his third Georgia-Alabama game this weekend in Tuscaloosa.
The first sitting president to attend a game was Theodore Roosevelt, who attended the Army-Navy game in 1901. He was also, arguably, chiefly responsible for the game of football as we know it today.
In 1905, football was a form of upper-class homicide. That year, 18 players died in college, amateur and high school games, a big jump up from the previous year. Broken bones, severe concussions and occasional deaths were common in a game dominated by mass-momentum plays like the flying wedge, inadequate equipment and loose attention to the rules. Roosevelt was averse to increasing calls to abolish the sport, but he concluded that football was “on trial.” He summoned the coaches and athletic directors of Harvard, Princeton and Yale to the White House and browbeat them into a commitment to cleaning up the sport.
This led within a matter of months to the formation of what is now the NCAA, and a series of rules changes, increasing the requirement for a first down from five to 10 yards, banning wedge plays, and introducing what the New York Times accurately described as “a radical departure,” the forward pass. In one of the last games played before the institution of the new rules, the 1905 season closer between Harvard and Yale, the president’s son, Theodore Roosevelt Jr., suffered a broken nose.
“Many predict the ruination of the game through the drastic reformation, while others profess to see a big improvement. ….No one is in a position to foretell exactly what the outcome of the changes will be,” the Times commented in a lengthy analysis published as the next season began in 1906.
If you had to pick one game played since then that would illustrate what the outcome of the changes would be, you could hardly do better than the 2018 national championship game between Georgia and Alabama in Mercedes-Benz Stadium. That game also illustrates something about the politics involved.
To this day, you can go on social media sites and watch that fateful fourth-down play when Tua Tagovailoa connects with DeVonta Smith to win the Natty for Alabama in overtime. Do many people know whether Trump had left the game by then, or even remember that he was there?
Presidents, Trump included, seem to relish the feel-good vibes of a big game, but this comes at the likely cost of being merely the observer at the main event, especially in the SEC. And there’s always the worry that your motorcade will cause a monumental traffic snarl, or something the Secret Service does disrupts headset communications between coaches.
Air Force One did a low flyover last month when Trump attended the Texas-Tennessee game in Knoxville, and Trump appeared on the stadium Jumbotron several times, to a mixture of cheers and boos. Even so, the game, a narrow 20-17 win by Texas, was the headliner.
“They say it’s gonna be a good game. I would think so,” Trump said last week about Georgia-Alabama when he announced he’d be attending this week’s game.
Incidentally, the second Georgia-Alabama game attended by Trump was Alabama’s regular season victory over Georgia in 2024. Do we see a pattern here?
