The Best Is Yet to Come

For the first time since 1941 everybody was happy. The team was happy, the coaches were content, everybody else was lost for three days in a pleasant haze. Yale showed the same plays and the same backs that had been invincible for two years--and lost. Crimson runners broke away for long runs, linemen blocked like tigers, and the team came from behind in the last period to win going away.

When Art Valpey arrived in Cambridge last February, most of the self-styled experts felt sorry for this bright young man. He was supposed to be inheriting a bankrupt franchise on the Charles, where prestige was non-existent and morale appallingly low. The experts set up a sympathetic wailing for the innocent victim who was walking into a hornets' nest of powerful Ivy League squads that would decimate his team and rend his players limb from limb.

Well, the "experts" don't look quite so good this week. The first phase of Valpey's work is an accomplished fact and a successful one. The supposedly inexpert and demoralized Crimson players turned in consistently exciting football, scored in every game, and wound up by getting up off the floor to whip Brown and Yale.

But still better things are ahead for the people who had trouble following the ball on the basic plays that Valpey found time to install this season. When the sophomores who got their first bitter lessons at Ithaca and Princeton have been around for another couple of seasons, then Art Valpey may be able to say more each week than "We're making progress; we're still on fundamentals." That might be the reason that seven (7) scouts from Cornell spent last Saturday in the Stadium thinking about next October.