Production-Line Football

In Philadelphia last week, like the seesawing rubbernecks at a tennis match, eyes kept shifting from the Scoreboard clock to the field. Mighty Army was trailing Pennsylvania, 20-19, and there was less than a minute to play. Army's cool, spindle-legged Quarterback Arnold Galiffa called one fruitless off-tackle smash, one pass that went incomplete. Then he eyed the clock, too. Thirty-five seconds left.

Galiffa faded to pass. One Army man got loose for an instant on the goal line, and Galiffa fired straight & true, for a touchdown. It may well have been football's most dramatic moment of 1948. Final score: Army 26, Penn 20.

At South Bend, an unbelieving crowd of 59,305 saw mighty Notre Dame trail Northwestern into the last period, 7-6. This, too, looked for a time like the upset of the year. Then by sheer power, the Irish hacked and hammered at Northwestern's sturdy line, and finally managed to walk off field with their 20th straight victory since Nov. 9, 1946. The game ended with Notre Dame ahead, 12-7; it was Northwestern's last game with Notre Dame--at least for a while.

At Ann Arbor, there were no such dramatics. Michigan just pulverized Indiana, 54-0.

Big Operators. These three big operators, each a champion in his own right (and apt to remain so, since they don't meet each other), set the tone of 1948 football. They had put football on a production line--cranking out gold-plated offenses, big scores, and armies of specialists who paraded on & off the field between plays. Other coaches, watching their every move, as Little Steel watches Big, tried to do likewise with less to work with.

Was production-line football ruining the game? The 84,000 people who sat in on Indiana's rout didn't seem to think so. Michigan, using one squad for offense and another for defense, made 300 line-up changes during the game. The unlimited substitution rule made it all legal. At West Point, where the two-platoon system is well established, the offense and defense units practice on different fields, learn different sets of signals. Nobody denies that it is the most efficient way of running a football squad. What a rebellious contingent of coaches wanted to know was: where do the little schools with no reserves of manpower get off?

Many Switches. At New Haven, where his Yale team bowed to Princeton last week, roly-poly Coach Herman Hickman complained: "The way the boys switch in & out, I spend half my time seeing if there are nine, twelve or 14 men in the game ... I need an assistant."

With unlimited substitutions, says Tennessee's Coach Bob Neyland, the game has become a "rat race." It is now possible for football specialists to leave college without ever having made a tackle, recovered an enemy fumble, or intercepted a pass. How do you pick All-Americas from such half-players? The best argument for free substitutions was that it gave more kids a chance to get into the game, and earn their letter.

Red Grange, star of another era and another style of football, is all for the new. Said he: "You like to get spelled off once in a while. If you aren't, it can get pretty rugged in the fourth quarter." In fact, with fresh substitutions entering all the time, fans were now more apt to get a full 60 minutes of do-or-die football.

As the controversy waxed last week, the fans seemed to be in favor of specialization and the substitutions, even though they had trouble telling the players apart. The kids who play were generally for it; the coaches were split down the middle. One of the objectors was ex-All America Ernie Nevers, now a sportcaster. Said he: "The coaches are taking the game away from the kids. They're masterminding it from the bench, as if they were playing a chess game."

Until the rule is modified (a probability at next January's rules session), such big operators as Army, Michigan and Notre Dame would be hard to stop. But then, they would be anyhow.

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