Chicago Quits

In the paleolithic age of football, Chicago was a fearsome name. Under Coach Amos Alonzo Stagg, co-founder of the Big Ten Conference in 1896, the Maroons won more undisputed Conference championships than any of their nine rivals, went down in football history as the only team to beat Fielding H. Yost's early-century, point-a-minute monsters during their five-year reign of terror.

Seven years ago Coach Stagg was ousted when he reached three score and ten (Chicago's faculty retirement age). Young University President Robert Maynard Hutchins, a newcomer, had radical ideas about football. It received less attention than anthropology, no more than chess. In neolithic days Chicago became the dummy of the Big Ten. For three years it has failed to win a football game from any of its Conference opponents. This year the once mighty Maroons won two of eight games (against minor-league Oberlin and Wabash), had 308 points scored against them.

Last week Chicago quit intercollegiate football, asked to be released from games scheduled for 1940 and 1941. Said the Board of Trustees: "The university believes in athletics and in a comprehensive program of physical education for all students. It believes its particular interests and conditions are such that its students now derive no special benefit from intercollegiate football. . . . The university will continue to promote intramural sports and will encourage all students to participate in them. . . . The university trusts that its withdrawal from intercollegiate football will not require termination of its long and satisfactory relationship with other members of the intercollegiate conference known as the Big Ten. . . ."

Whether Chicago will be permitted to continue as a Conference member will be decided at a special meeting of the Big Ten next month. Quidnuncs predicted that the University of Pittsburgh, recently purified, will replace Chicago.

"It's a great blow," moaned 77-year-old Amos Alonzo Stagg, now coach at the little College of the Pacific. "I'm foolish enough to believe the action wouldn't have happened had I been there."

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