Setting-up Exercises

The cry annually is raised around the first Monday in October that big colleges should stop playing small colleges. For at least fifty years this has been true, because as far back as 1882 there was severe criticism of Dartmouth's folly at attempting to play football against Harvard.

It happened that this year on the same Saturday, Harvard, Yale, and Cornell played three of these small college teams, respectively Buffalo, Bates, and Niagara. Harvard won 66-0, Yale played Bates a scoreless tie, and Cornell managed to beat Niagara 7-0. The Bates game with Yale and the valiant fight that the Dave Morey coached team made at New Haven did much to curtail the criticism this year. Sports writers were agreed that on the actual play Bates was stronger.

Those who would criticize the small college-large college game appear to have overlooked one of the most important features about such games, the absence of injuries. It may be well to quote from an article written for the "News" a year ago by Morey in which he stated:

"Injuries are no more frequent or serious in the games against big college teams than in games with teams in our own class. The procedure for handling injured men is the same in either case, regardless of any supposed superiority in culture, reserves, technical skill or what not.

"In fact, it has been my experience that we lose fewer men in the big college games than in those against inferior opponents."

Bates did not lose a man against Yale, and the Yale losses were insignificant. In the Buffalo-Harvard game, Buffalo had no injuries and Harvard had one slight injury, from a collision between two Crimson players.

One hesitates to think of what might have happened, however, after two weeks of conditioning work, if Harvard and Dartmouth, or Harvard and Cornell had met on that same afternoon. Previous to that same with Buffalo, Harvard lost almost a dozen players by injuries in scrimmages with its own junior varsity team.

The Harvard Athletic Association does not believe in scheduling opponents who are not stronger in the way of man power than was Buffalo, but at the time the game was arranged almost two years ago, it was the Athletic Committee's understanding that Buffalo would be as strong as the usual New England college teams with whom Harvard opened its schedules. The Harvard viewpoint, however, on small college teams opening the varsity football season, when they are of the caliber of Bates, New Hampshire, Maine, or other New England colleges, is that such games are good sport for the players of both sides and that they are the safest kind of football games teams can play with the limited opportunity for practice and conditioning at hand by October 1. H.A.A. News.