Tired of 'Getting Behind the Team,' Students Are Putting Football in its Place, Says Gallico

Any discussion or set of opinions on intercollegiate football really belongs in the "Whither-Are-We-Drifting" Department which is better equipped to view with alarm the growing tendency. The least interesting part of every football season is the public bleating that has accompanied it for the last four or five years, a sort of flat, dull noise emanating mostly from flat, dull people.

"Sweaty Exorcists on Wane"

For some time I have suspected that the student body is becoming a little bored with football. The sweaty exorcists (who in later life become go-getters and promoters) are having less and less success in the eastern schools at their self imposed jobs of routing the students out of their dormitories to burn red fire in the square and mutter gibberish in union the night before a so called big game. This Medieval hocus-pocus known as "Getting Behind the Team," is being left behind in favor of an attitude which, in itself, may prove the most effective balance wheel to the sport. The undergraduates to whom I have spoken no longer regard their football teams as something akin to the defenders of the Grail, but rather as an adjunct to the university, put there for their entertainment on Saturday afternoons, and somewhat in the same category as the tennis courts, the swimming pool and the golf course.

No "Pop Rallies"

Thus, a good college will have a good football team and an exciting schedule, and, since it is pleasurable to see one's colors on top, a winning one. These things seem now to go along with stimulating professors, steam-heated dormitories and appetizing coeds or local debutants. But the student is not summoned out into the night to take part in a pop rally because the Chair in Astronomy has been a terrific dull for the past two weeks, nor does he snake dance or ignite bonfires when some wealthy old fellow, departing for Valhalla, wills the university five or six hundred grand for an architectural atrocity to be tacked onto the Field House and known as the Hiram K. Washboiler Memorial Wing.

"Cultivated in Football Hothouses"

The football team is becoming quite as far removed and impersonal to the student body as the above items. The average undergraduate is only weakly represented on any squad. The coaches themselves have finally broken down and confessed that they require specialists to play the game correctly and successfully, and that good football teams are not made by picking forty or fifty beefy and eugenically perfect specimens, the best of, let us say, two thousand, five hundred and teaching them football. The football star of today is nurtured and developed over a period of years. He is cultivated in various football hothouses until he is ripe for transplanting in this school or that.

Nix on "Rickety Rax"

I notice, as I wander on succeeding Saturdays from game to game and from university to university, that the duty of shricking to rhythm of rhymed nonsense, a hangover from mauve days when the boys were turtle neck sweaters and hats with brims turned up and pinned back with brooches in the shape of "Harvard", "Yale," and "Princeton" pennants, is being relegated more and more to freshmen and alumni. The undergraduate of any intelligence is growing resentful of having his afternoon's enjoyment for which he paid disrupted by the necessity of having to howl such items as "Rickety Rax," and "Ackalakaching," and "Rah rah!"

"Putting Football into Its Place"

In other words, the undergraduate himself is beginning to put football in its place. If it over becomes fashionable for him to lose entire interest in the doings of the so-called 'Varsity in favor of personal participation in a slightly less strenuous adaptation, the game will cease to wag and the college and public hysteria will find another outlet. The steady growth of a more mature intelligence throughout the student bodies of the various schools of any intellectual and cultural importance will eventually accomplish all that the most hysterical. Viewer with Alarm could wish for, and with less fuss and attendant by-products of ennui.