Egg in Your Beer

Conspicuous for his absence among Eastern football players receiving all-star recognition from the Associated Press this weekend was fullback John Culver. This was not a matter of the varsity football team being ignored; it was probably just a case of ignorance. Harvard wasn't entirely shunned; Dick Clasby made the first team, and the A.P. did tab him "Harvard's one man offense."

All-American teams have always been suspected as something determined between local football writers, with the most voluble of those men producing the most all-star players.

Something like that must have happened in this case. Certainly someone named Don Williams, who apparently plays for Colgate, did not deserve honorable mention above Culver. Perhaps Williams is the Colgate sports publicity man. At any rate, he didn't start here this fall.

Reviewing this football season, it seems almost impossible that Culver didn't receive some kind of mention in the East from the A.P., particularly when Princeton's Homer Smith was voted the top fullback in the East. Now there is a new theory, not one that you read about too often, but a theory, and a good portion of the Yale defensive line adheres to this theory, that Culver is a better fullback than Smith.

Now this is only a theory, and many will argue that Smith was the whole Princeton team this year, and that he deserved everything he got. They will say that Smith played against tougher opposition than Culver. Certainly, the only limit on the number of superlatives that Princeton coach Charlie Caldwell has for Smith is set by his own vocabulary. It must be noted, however, that Caldwell picked Culver for his all-opponent team, that Culver played a better game against Yale than Smith, that Smith gained only five more yards than Culver in one more game this year. It is only a theory about Culver, but it is just amazing to find Smith the best fullback in the East, and Culver not even mentioned.

"You were a great fullback today, John," Lloyd Jordan told him after the Yale game, and this has been true of Culver all season, both on defense and offense. There was no one man in the Harvard backfield this season; one of the four men was a very fast, very powerful fullback, who doubled as an alert, hard tackling halfback on defense. Mathematically, he was not a 60 minute fullback. But ask some opposing halfbacks if he was really trying in there on defense. And as for offense, well, just look at the picture.