A CHIMERA TO KILL

With the acreage of sporting news in the daily paper steadily increasing, the fate of a college football team seems to rest not so much in the hands of the college or of the team itself as upon the point of the sporting editor's pen. The name of any of the larger universities attached to an item of news greatly enhances its market value, and sport writers must live. Hence the very health of a football player becomes a public commodity.

Some of the manifest danger of this condition were made evident by the results of the game in the Stadium last Saturday. One team ranks as heroes, in the history of the sporting page, through having conquered, by peace if not victory, the "mighty Harvard"; the other meets criticism filled with innuendo for having bowed to "defeat". What actually happened was that eleven college men, differing little in fact from other undergraduates, met eleven others and played to a tie score.

The chimera of infallibility has indelibly been sketched in printer's ink about the name of any one of the Big Three. The men are dubbed gridiron heroes, many as early as their preparatory school days, and immediately they cease to be mortal. Once deified in this way by sport writers, the chronicle of their doings becomes of far greater value.

But unfortunately perhaps these men are mortal. The men on the field are the same met day after day in the Yard, and who appear so much like the other men that no one but a sporting editor could tell the difference. It seems ridiculous to believe that of a score of undergraduates sitting in Sever one should be selected as infallible. Yet it is upon just such as absurdity that the current notion of "Big Three impregnability" is based, and that the shame of such a team in defeat rests.