HARMFUL MEDDLING

"No coaching from the sidelines" is a rallying cry for all brands of football enthusiasts and is a rule successfully designed to eliminate a multitude of evils; but like so many popular slogans, incorporated into law, it is intended to express a general feeling and will not stand the test of rigorous and logical application. Unfortunately it is just such application that some critics seem to demand.

Of late it has become more and more the fashion to deplore the passing of the good old days when football teams played for the love of the game, and there were few if any coaches, and no elaborate "systems", and strategy and plans of campaign. Perhaps the good old days really existed once. But as one of the members of the Harvard coaching staff points out in today's CRIMSON, "rightly or wrongly, football has become a matter of immense importance to all college men." Rightly or wrongly, too, the game as now played requires a coach who will act as field marshal and take most of the weight of responsibility on his own shoulders. The captain has responsibility enough; to burden him with the duty of removing and substituting men would prove overwhelming. If Harvard wishes to win even a reasonable number of its games, it must "play the game" as it finds it.

It is always tempting to take the ideal point of view and argue that after all football is a sport and not a business, that it would be better if the undergraduates who were most concerned directed all athletic work, that in football in particular the emphasis has been disproportionate and the individual made a mere cog in a machine. But such arguments, however tempting, are idle unless they accord with facts. And the trend during the past two decades at least has been in the opposite direction. There are signs that even crew, which, in the past, has relied more than other sports upon undergraduate direction, has been forced by the logic of the situation to adopt the efficient system of control and responsibility centered in the coach.

But the system of undergraduate control has much to recommend it and during the past two or three years has gained the support of a reaction against the so-called over-emphasis on athletics, particularly in football. Thus while crew at one end of the scale is falling into line, there is a feeling in some quarters that the power and responsibility of the coach in football have reached their zenith. It is unlikely that they will grow much more. But an attempt arbitrarily to hasten their decline, if, in fact, a decline is advisable, would be idle and harmful.