Fluid Scramble

Since college basketball broad-jumped from campus gymnasiums to big city arenas, the pace of the game has increased from fast & furious to breathless & breakneck. To meet spectators' demand for action, the coaches (who now rate basketmaking 4-to-1 over defensive play) have had to develop a pack of new tricks as well as refine the old standbys. As a result, the game is not only faster but a whole lot more complicated than it was a few years ago.

In their scramble for points, many of this season's well-tutored fives employ several different types of offense, and make split-second adjustments from one to another as the situation demands. To offset the fluid offenses, coaches have rigged fluid defenses, in which the players shift back & forth from zone defense to man-to-man, with variations. Even the old set plays have acquired delicate subtleties comparable to the different blocking assignments that give a football team half a dozen kinds of off-tackle plays from one basic pattern.

Big Three. With three months and 25-plus games to go, any one of a dozen teams may turn out to be this year's national champ. Each will have its stars--but none of them is likely to outshine the three who make Oklahoma A. & M., Utah and DePaul the early-season teams to beat.

Playing the Eastern circuit last week, Oklahoma A. & M. gave 18,102 Manhattanites a chance to size up its redhaired, 7-ft. Bob Kurland. the game's No. 1 tall timber. With Kurland collecting rebounds by the handful--his jumping reach is higher than the 10-ft.-high basket--unbeaten A. & M. humbled first-class N.Y.U., 44-to-41. (In another Madison Square Garden doubleheader, Muhlenberg's Mules, playing a cagey boring-in game, took St. Francis in stride, 56-to-18, for their sixth straight.)

Far & away the outstanding performer of the week was lithe, 6-ft. 3 1/2-in. Arnold Ferrin, lone regular left from Utah's 1944 National Collegiate Championship team. Faster, more graceful than ever (see cut), he put on a one-man show that just missed upsetting St. John's, strongest of the metropolitan New York teams.

Ferrin's closest competitor for early-season effectiveness is skyscraping George Mikan, the center-pin of DePaul's formidable five. In Chicago Stadium last week, even the full weight of his 6-ft.-9 power could not stop Illinois, which won, 43-to-40.

The Illini, with six veterans back, are among the Midwest's best. So are Iowa's Hawkeyes, Ohio State's Buckeyes, Notre Dame's Irish (whose basketball record through the years is nearly as good as its football record), and Valparaiso's altitudinous Indianians, eight of whose dozen players are 6 ft.-3 or taller. Valparaiso and its 2--year-old star, Bob Dille, might prove to be the cream of the whole crop.

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