THE DOPE SWEET

Football is a game of unending upsets and contradictions, baseball games may turn on the uncertain news of a pitcher or on an irregularity in the ground, but in track the dopesters and the mathematician may stiff command attention. Track performances vary, but they usually vary within limits. And it is these limits that give purpose and excuse to the pre-meet mathematicians who about this time of year begin to flood the sporting pages with their carefully weighed prognostications.

Tomorrow Harvard and Yale clash in what promises to be one of the most closely contested meets in recent years. The "Its" loom unusually large and the difficulties of the dopester are correspondingly increased. Despite the dangers of prophesying about an issue so delicately balanced as that of tomorrow's meet the dope sheets are already appearing. A former Harvard captain gives Yale a three point advantage. But that, it appears, is only mathematics, and to a Harvard man such mathematics make very little appeal. One cannot fall to read between the lines that Harvard determination is worth far more than three points. A prominent Boston sports writer, more ingenious in the perilous art of doping, given two columns of figures, one for the optimist, the other for the conservative. The first reads eighty points for Harvard, the second fifty-eight and a third. The chances of error here are slight: some-where within these limits, lies the actual victory, as well as the possibilities which tomorrow afternoon will draw hundreds of Crimson and Blue supporters to the Stadium.