Open Season

The only certainty about college football this fall is its uncertainty. A surprising number of last year's pushovers have become powerhouses; many a former powerhouse will be a pushover. Few teams, good or bad, can hope to keep intact for the whole season; many teams, with no time to perfect systems, will gamble on tricky offensives. Almost anything can happen on the nation's college gridirons this fall--and the Army will get blamed for much of it.

Hapless and Hopeful. To 209 colleges and universities the Army sent more than 100,000 soldiers for special studies--and positively no football. These A-12 trainees, said the Army, would have no time for football (not even, presumably, the kind that servicemen in the Aleutians are playing). Navy and Marine officials, on the contrary, okayed football for 77,000 bluejackets and leathernecks in 181 colleges with V12 programs. Colleges with no V12 windfall, with or without an A-12 tantalization, had the choice of supporting teams of 4-Fs and 17-year-olds or giving up.

Major casualties among the 300 who gave up: Stanford, Fordham, Alabama, Tennessee, Georgetown. Individualist Harvard decided something was better than nothing, arranged "token" games for its A and B squads with Tufts, Exeter, Andover, Camp Edwards.

Among those who carried on:

>Ohio State, last year's Big Ten champion, had lost 100 players from its combined varsity and freshmen squad.

> Rochester, habitual minor leaguer, had a V12 program and the prospects of a lifetime.

> Rice Institute's 1942 bone-crushers had enlisted en masse in the Marines.

> Southwest Louisiana Institute, an obscure V12 beneficiary, got most of the Rice team.

> Illinois Coach Ray Elliot took a gander at his squad, wrote on the blackboard: "Illinois . . . Played 10, Won 0."

> Texas A. & M., which had 30 big-time players immobilized by A12, had a team of neophyte freshmen and sophomores.

> Richmond was a southern V12 "sleeper."

> Michigan had over a dozen former Wisconsin lettermen on its squad and a dream backfield of potential all-Americas: Wisconsin's Elroy ("Crazy Legs") Hirsch and Jack Wink, Minnesota's star fullback Bill Daley, Michigan's own Paul White.

Grades and Gambles. It was no simple upside-down affair. Inside the V12 schools, coaches had plenty of headaches.

First among the aspirin-promoters was the Navy's strict monthly check on trainees' scholastic accomplishments. At Southern California, seven of the team's best prospects were on the sidelines last week because grades were down. At Yale, two husky tackles were flunking out of football via celestial navigation.

Other headaches: many V-12ers will graduate during the height of the football season (all-America Halfback Angelo Bartolo Bertelli leaves Notre Dame Oct. 30 for the Parris Island Marine base); because of rigid schedules, trainees will average only 20 hours of preseason practice (prewar average: 50 hours); age levels have dropped sharply (Princeton, which had averaged a 21-year-old squad, now averages 17 to 18); sudden shifts and mysterious whiskings-away of Naval trainees (said Dartmouth's Coach Earl Brown: "We are supposed to have inherited a wealth of brawn and brain . . . but I can tell you a lot of those aces supposedly here are not on the scene").

One reasonably sure thing was that college football this fall would be worth watching. Many of the name coaches (Harvard's Dick Harlow, Minnesota's Bernie Bierman, Fordham's Sleepy Jim Crowley, Iowa's Hunk Anderson) had gone into the services. The old hands still on the job were short of time if not talent, would have a hard time putting together the kind of precision machine that football fans had been accustomed to watching. Especially to new coaches, who saw a chance to make a quick reputation, the possibilities of a wide-open game, full of long-gain gambles, looked inviting. It might be quite a season for the customers.

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