R. I. P.

The score was 14-to-12, with 28 seconds to play. Unbeaten in nine games, outplayed in its tenth but ahead anyhow, Notre Dame was about to cinch its national championship. Then Seaman Steve Lach, former Duke and Chicago Cardinal star, heaved a 54-yard pass to Quarterback Paul Anderson, and that was the ball game: Notre Dame 14, Great Lakes Naval Training Station 19.

In a season of few real upsets, this Hollywoody finish to the biggest one of all climaxed the oddest season since William Webb Ellis picked up a football and ran with it in 1823.

It was a season of one-sided scores. Thanks to Navy and Marine transfers, 1943 football talent came in bunches or not at all. Because of Army's ban, more than 200 colleges had no teams. It was a season of poor kicking and few brilliant ends, and nobody could say why. It was a season in which spectators grew so dis gusted with out-of-bounds kickoffs that the Rules Committee may well make them illegal by next fall.

The game that might have been the season's biggest drew only 15,000. Army and Navy, have played before 110,000.

Last week, before stands half-filled, by people living within a Presidentially pre scribed ten-mile radius of West Point, Navy's passing attack was good for only six yards but its running offense punctured Army's line, 13-to-o.

T Is for Fun. The season's feature was the old T formation heavily refurbished, a backfield line-up that looks just as it sounds. Because its deception makes it fun to play, and because its line play is individual rather than team blocking, the T was ideal in a season of short practices and shifting squads. With its fancy ball handling, the T was also responsible for many fumbles and heavy penalties for holding by linemen.

It was also the season in which the ancient wheeze about the water boy came true. Against Texas Christian University three weeks ago, Texas used theirs to kick two extra points.

Football in 1943 was not quite dead yet. Rose, Cotton, Sugar, Orange Bowls and the East-West Shrine game still remain to be played, a dozen or more All-America teams to be picked. The first important one was published this week by the Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate, after polling 86 sportswriters. Its features: five Marines, five Notre Dame players, only one civilian (Notre Dame's Creighton Miller, who was discharged from the Army for high blood pressure). The lineup:

Ends: Yonakor (Notre Dame, Marine); Heywood (U.S.C., Marine).

Tackles: White (Notre Dame, Navy); Whitmire (Annapolis).

Guards: Filley (Notre Dame, Marines); Agase (Purdue, Marine).

Center: Myslinski (West Point).

Backs: Bertelli (Notre Dame, Marine); Daley (Michigan, Navy); Odell (Pennsylvania, Navy); Miller (Notre Dame).

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