Deflating Football

There have been attempts to reform football by college Presidents who mildly or vehemently deplored the young generation and all its works. There have been attempts to reform football by young literati among the undergraduates and minorities of alumni who doubt if the game is worth its present price. Now comes an attempt to reform football by the regulars themselves. Representatives of six colleges met in Middletown on Sunday. They were neither alumni, nor Presidents, nor editors of classical monthlies with a flair for Elizabethan verse; they were, instead, the editors of undergraduate daily newspapers and the Chairmen of undergraduate student bodies at Harvard, Princeton, Bowdoin, Williams, Dartmouth and Wesleyan.

What do these men think of football? Not that it is a giant trust or a brutal show of beer and brawn. They like the game. It is good to watch. Besides, it makes for unity within colleges and for friendship between different crowds of men in different colleges. The only trouble with it, they suggest, is that the game has become a circus. Perhaps, judging from the resolutions they agreed upon, this does justice to their way of thinking: "We're not in college to be grinds: but we are in college, after all, to sharpen our wits and live not entirely on the sporting pages and acquire a sense of proportion about life as we shall probably live it. For the whole fall term, and for part of the rest of the year, football makes us live from Saturday to Saturday in a side-show of $100,000 gates, imported betting touts, perfervid enthusiasms solely on one subject, and semi-professional right guards. We object to overdoing it."

What these undergraduates propose is a set of four reforms: paying coaches salaries commensurate with the salaries said professors taking coaches off the bench while games are played so that the contest will be between teams and not between coaches cutting schedules to four games and playing these games with teams in the same class and the same vicinity, to do away with "championships."

There are two things which are impressive in these proposals. First, they are shrewd: they have accurately sized up the situation which they hope to alter. Second, they are genuine: here are undergraduates thinking out their own problems under nobody's guiding hand.

The undergraduates can do with football what they wish to do with it. It is essentially their business and not the business of Presidents, faculties, and alumni. This Middletown statement is as interesting and as challenging as anything which has come from the colleges in years. New York World.