Babes in Wonderland

(See Cover)

Necessity may be the mother of invention, but accident is the midwife. Take penicillin. Nobody could, if Alexander Fleming's staphylococcus culture hadn't spoiled. Crepes suzette would be only soggy pancakes if Chef Henri Charpentier's sauce had not caught fire. The X ray, vulcanized rubber, LSD--even America, for that matter--were all discovered by accident, and people might still be wondering why their feet are attached to the ground if an apple had not conked Isaac Newton on the head.

It was in that same grand tradition of scientific serendipity that a couple of Yale football players named Walter Camp and Oliver Thompson made their contribution to a better world on Nov. 30, 1876. Tackled by a Princeton defender, Camp did an utterly unprecedented thing: in desperation, he flung the football down the field. Thompson somehow grabbed it and scampered for a touchdown. "Foul! Foul!" screamed the outraged Princeton team. The bewildered referee settled the ensuing rhubarb the only way he could think of. He flipped a coin, Yale won the toss--and the forward pass was born.

Nothing looks beautiful at birth. Camp's pass to Thompson was airborne for maybe all of 5 or 6 yds. It was thrown underhand and wobbled precariously end over end--because the overhand spiral was the result of still another accident, which did not occur for 30 more years. Nobody knows for sure who happened onto it first. All at once, half a dozen players started throwing corkscrews, grasping the ball by its laces and rifling it through the air. But it took another 60 years and a horde of exceptional athletes to pull the cork completely out of the bottle.

Across the U.S. last week, it seemed to be raining footballs. No. 4-ranked Alabama scored three touchdowns on passes in a 42-6 pasting of Vanderbilt; the passing bug was so contagious that even a fullback tossed for a TD. Between them, Purdue and No. 2-ranked Michigan State put the ball in the air 51 times, and M.S.U. wound up with the ball game 41-20. Missouri, which was expected to run all over lowly Iowa State, needed a leaping touchdown catch in the final minutes to salvage a 10-10 tie. And Harvard, which had stuck to the ground so doggedly all season that it ranked first in the nation in rushing, pulled out a 19-14 victory over favored Dartmouth--by throwing the ball 23 times, including a ten-yarder for a TD. That was eleven times fewer than No. 7-ranked Nebraska had to pass to squeak past Colorado 21-19.

With 30 m.p.h. wind gusts at Norman, Okla., it was obviously blowing too hard for anybody except a wildcatter to suggest gambling on a pass. But when Notre Dame Quarterback Terry Hanratty throws to End Jim Seymour, it is more like a sure thing. Sophomores Hanratty and Seymour are the hottest young passing combination in the U.S., and even though they strut their stuff for unbeaten Notre Dame, the No. 1-ranked team in the nation, they figured to have their hands full with an Oklahoma squad that was also unbeaten and ranked No. 10. They made it look easy, though, Seymour caught three Hanratty tosses for 47 yds.: one set up a touchdown; another a field goal. But Seymour had to leave the game in the second quarter with a sprained ankle when a Sooner defender grabbed his leg as he leaped to catch a fourth pass. Hanratty stayed on long enough to complete eleven out of 17 passes for 129 yds., then joined Seymour on the sidelines to root on the subs as the Fighting Irish handed the Sooners their worst defeat in 21 years, 38-0.

Through the Hoop. Brief though it was, the performance was impressive for a couple of downy-cheeked teen-agers who were playing only their fifth game of college football. But Terrence Hugh Hanratty, 18, and James Patrick Seymour, 19, are a pair apart, even if they still get 35 shaves out of a Beep-Beep blade.

Terry Hanratty can zing a football 60 yds. with a flick of his right wrist on a trajectory so flat that the ball will rise no more than 10 ft. off the ground. When he was still in high school, he stood at one end of a gymnasium and flipped the ball four times in a row through an 18-in.-wide basketball hoop at the other end of the building. Jim Seymour, at 6 ft. 4 in. and 205 lbs., is still growing and he can run the 100-yd. dash in 9.7 sec. He can also "juke" his hips, dip his shoulder, toss his head, flutter his eyelashes, and leave a safety man twisted up like a pretzel as he cuts downfield for a pass. He can then leap 4 ft. straight up and pluck a football out of the sky--with such tenderness that one observer reported: "You can stand right next to him and never hear the ball hit his hands."

Individually, Hanratty and Seymour are wondrously talented athletes. Talent is one thing; teamwork is another. The true baseball fan applauds the double play more loudly than he does the home run. The true tennis fan sits entranced at the ballet performed between two perfectly matched doubles partners. And for the football buff, the difference between a blasting plunge into the line and a perfectly executed forward pass is the difference between prose and poetry. The rapport that exists between a gifted passer and his favorite receiver is part instinct, part practice, and part alchemy. Bennie Oosterbaan, who formed half of such a team when he was on the receiving end of Benny Friedman's feathery passes at Michigan in the 1920s, calls it "a familiarity with each other's capacity." Hanratty and Seymour have that familiarity, and their capacity, at least for excitement, seems limitless.

The very first time that Terry threw a pass for keeps to Jim, in this season's opening game against highly touted Purdue, it went for 42 yds. By the time the afternoon was over, Hanratty and Seymour had clicked twelve more times for a total of 276 yds. and three touchdowns in a 26-14 victory, and Purdue Coach Jack Mollenkopf could only groan: "We weren't prepared for this." Nobody was. Against Northwestern the following week, Notre Dame's amazing sophomores teamed up nine times for 141 yds. and spent most of the fourth quarter lolling on the bench as the Irish rolled to a 35-7 victory.

Army was No. 3, and the poor cadets, undefeated until then, never had a chance. Notre Dame scored the first time Hanratty got the ball, and scored again less than 120 seconds later when Seymour blew right past the cadets' secondary and gathered in a perfect 30-yd. TD toss from Hanratty. The final score was 35-0--"a military disaster," as one Chicago sportswriter put it--the worst drubbing Notre Dame had ever handed Army in a 38-game series that goes back to 1913.

North Carolina was the Irish's fourth opponent, and the Tar Heels could almost say that they had stopped Terry and Jim. Almost. Hanratty completed only five passes, and only one of those went to Seymour. But it was a gorgeous 56-yd. strike that Seymour gathered in on the Tar Heels' 14-yd. line, carried the rest of the way in about four giant strides. Final score: Notre Dame 32, North Carolina 0.

Green Power. "Good Lord, they're only babies," Coach Ara Parseghian keeps insisting--as if he can hardly believe it all himself. By last week Hanratty and Seymour had connected 34 times for 675 yds. and five touchdowns. Sportswriters were calling them "the Dynamic Duo," "the Teen Terrors," "the Super Sophs," "the Kiddie Korps." Notre Dame's fervent subway alumni were handing out stickers proclaiming "Green power!", and normally hard-headed football experts were agape with awe.

Gil Brandt of the Dallas Cowboys says that both Hanratty and Seymour are "certain to be first-round draft choices"--though they won't even be eligible for the professional draft until January 1968. The Baltimore Colts' Upton Bell talks dreamily about Seymour's ability to "stop a missile and hold on to it," Hanratty's "on-the-mark, 50-yd. bullets" that travel even faster than the passes thrown by the Colts' own superb Johnny Unitas. George Dickson of the Atlanta Falcons calls Terry Hanratty "the best Notre Dame passer in 25 years"--quite an endorsement, since that includes Johnny Lujack, Frank Tripucka, Ralph Guglielmi, Paul Hornung, George Izo and John Huarte. As for Jim Seymour, the Houston Oilers' Don Klosterman says flatly: "This boy is the best pro prospect I've ever seen at any position. I believe he could make any professional team in the country right now."

Oldtime football fans let go of their heroes hard.

Walter Camp, wobbly ball and all, is college football's original immortal. And nobody at Notre Dame is ever likely to forget Gus Dorais and Knute Rockne, who on a grey afternoon in 1913 demonstrated for the first time how deadly the forward pass could be--by demoralizing an unbeaten Army team that outweighed the Fighting Irish by 15 Ibs. per man. Dorais threw, Rockne caught; the Irish soared 243 yds. in the air and upset mighty Army 35-13.

Few & Far Between. The game of football has never been quite the same since--a good thing, too, because it might otherwise not even exist today. Old-fashioned "pig pile" football was a brutal way to spend an afternoon: the casualty toll for the 1905 season alone was 18 deaths and 149 serious injuries, and President Theodore Roosevelt talked about abolishing the sport. The forward pass opened up the game and made it safer. Massed defenses, designed only to stop a crunching ground attack, swiftly became obsolete as more and more teams included the pass among the weapons in their arsenals. Still, brilliant passers, brilliant receivers--and brilliant passing combinations--were few and far between. There was Friedman-to-Oosterbaan, of course. There were Alabama's Rose Bowl champions of 1935, with Dixie Howell throwing to Don Hutson--who later went on to the Green Bay Packers and set five National Football League pass-receiving records that still stand today.

But all through the '20s and '30s and even the '40s--when Notre Dame's Lujack was pitching to Leon Hart and Princeton's Dick Kazmaier was throwing strikes to Frank McPhee--the pass was a sometime thing. In his biggest year, Quarterback Lujack gained 791 yds. on passes, a figure that Terry Hanratty has already eclipsed this year with five games still to go. "The pass was a necessary evil," explains Whitey Piro, a onetime Iowa coach, now a scout for the pro Buffalo Bills. "You passed only when you were in trouble, when you had long yardage to make on third down. But practically no techniques were taught. You just ran toward the goal line and looked back every so often to see if the ball was coming your way." Says Georgia Tech Coach Bobby Dodd, an All-America quarterback at Tennessee in 1930: "When I was playing football, we'd throw maybe eight or ten times a game. Now we throw 20 or 30--or more."

Why? Partly because it's fun. Partly because it's necessary. "If you can't pass, you can't win," says Southern Cal Coach John McKay. But mostly they throw because they know how to throw--and catch--better than anybody ever did before. "Look, I don't want to disparage anybody," says U.C.L.A. Coach Tommy Prothro. "But you list all the great passing combinations in chronological order, and it's almost certain that each one was better than the one that went before. Today's passing game is more refined."

Starting at Four. It ought to be, considering how much effort goes into it. At Tennessee, Coach Doug Dickey allots 60% of his practice time to passing drills, only 40% to running--although passing accounts for only 40% of the Volunteers' offense. U.C.L.A.'s Prothro and Notre Dame's Parseghian both insist that their quarterbacks throw for at least half an hour every day, in season and out. The quarterbacks rarely have to be reminded. There's no trick to learning how to pass, says John Huarte, star of Parseghian's 1964 Notre Dame team (which lost only to Southern Cat in its last game) and now a pro with the Boston Patriots. "You start when you are about four years old and throw and throw and throw." In the offseason, Huarte still throws to "anybody who will catch the ball. I'd throw to my wife if she could catch it."

There is one other explanation, according to Parseghian, for the quality of today's college passing game: "The population explosion." What the population seems to be exploding is mostly football players. "We're getting more and greater quarterbacks, more and greater receivers," Ara says. "Maybe vitamins are part of it too." Compared to 6-ft. 1-in., 190-lb. Terry Hanratty, Gus Dorais, at 5 ft. 7 in. and 145 Ibs., was practically a midget; he would have had the devil's own time trying to spot Knute Rockne over the heads of today's massive linemen. And how would Rockne, at 5 ft. 8 in. and weighing 145 Ibs., compare with a giant like Jim Seymour? But in college football today, rangy, strong-armed passers like Hanratty and rawboned, speedy receivers like Seymour are the rule rather than the exception. Practically every team in the U.S. boasts somebody who can throw "the bomb" and somebody who can catch it. Among the best:

> Florida's Steve Spurrier, 21, and Richard Trapp, 20, have a simple system of signals: whenever Flanker Trapp sees that he is not being "double-teamed"--meaning covered by two defensive backs--he nods to Quarterback Spurrier, who immediately throws to him. A 9.8-sec. sprinter who is most dangerous on flat passes, Trapp has caught 31 passes for 489 yds. and six touchdowns, is one of the main reasons Florida is ranked No. 8 in the nation. Frank Jackson, an end on the pro Miami Dolphins, says Spurrier is "already better than a bunch of passers in both pro leagues."

> U.C.L.A.'s Gary Beban, 20, and Harold Busby, 19, provide the punch for a razzle-dazzle offense that has averaged 431.2 yds. and 37.6 points per game--both tops in the nation. The closest call experienced all year by the unbeaten, No. 3-ranked Bruins came at Rice, when they trailed 24-16 with a little more than three minutes to go. Quarterback Beban threw a 33-yd. pass that was deflected by two Rice defenders; Flanker Busby, a 9.4-sec.-dash man, flashed behind the defenders, leaped, and snared the ball for a touchdown. A 2-point conversion and a last-minute field goal rescued U.C.L.A. from near disaster 27-24. "It sure helps to have fast ones out there to receive," says Beban, who runs as well as he throws, has gained a total of 1,254 yds. so far this season.

> Purdue's Bob Griese, 21, and James Beirne, 20, are both throwbacks of a sort. Griese is a true triple threat who can run and kick as well as pass. Unfettered by fundamentals, Griese often throws off-balance or off the wrong foot; yet he boasts perhaps the quickest release of any passer in college football and was a consensus All-America last year. Receiver Beirne is not particularly fast, but he has the deceptive moves to break loose from defenders.

> Tennessee's Dewey Warren, 21, and Johnny Mills, 21, have had only a soso, 3-2 season--on the Scoreboard. Which was to be expected, since their school scheduled Georgia Tech (No. 6 ranked) and Alabama (No. 4) back to back. The Vols lost both games by a total of four points. Neither loss was the fault of Quarterback Warren, who has hit on 61 out of 99 passes for a completion percentage of 62%--or of Split End Mills, who has caught 20 for 212 yds.

Such Beautiful Balance. If a team can't win without passing, it also can't win by just passing--certainly not in the company that Notre Dame keeps. "Usually," says Southern Cal's McKay, whose unbeaten Trojans play the Irish on Nov. 26, "the really significant throwing teams--the ones that lead the nation in passing--are losers." Parseghian concurs. "What we are after is balance," he says, and balance he's got. Notre Dame's massive defensive line weighs in at 240 Ibs. per man and looks even bigger--mostly because of Tackle Kevin Hardy, a ferocious 270-Ib. junior. Two weeks ago, against North Carolina, Hardy put on an awe-inspiring show of strength: charging right over the lighter Tar Heel linemen, he personally made half a dozen tackles, recovered a fumble, blocked four North Carolina passes and deflected a fifth into the hands of a Notre Dame linebacker.

To run the ball, Parseghian can call on Fullback Larry Conjar and Halfback Nick Eddy--both of whom are being touted for All-America this year. To open holes for the ground game, or hold off enemy blitzes on pass plays, he has an offensive forward wall that averages 225 Ibs. per man and takes it as a personal insult whenever anybody so much as lays a grimy paw on Terry Hanratty's blue jersey. "After the Army game," recalls Terry, "I was talking to Paul Seiler, the tackle, and I said, 'Gee, Paul, I've been hit three times in three games this year.' I was just joking, but he said seriously, 'That's three times too many, Terry.' " North Carolina's athletic director, Chuck Erickson, calls this year's edition of the Fighting Irish "the strongest Notre Dame team ever," and Army's defensive-back coach Ralph Hawkins predicts: "At least twelve of those guys will be drafted by the pros."

In their fierce pride, their dedication--and their explosiveness--the Irish are practically a mirror image of their coach. An Armenian Protestant who came to Catholic Notre Dame from Northwestern in 1963 and overnight restored its long-tarnished reputation for football excellence, Ara Parseghian (TIME cover, Nov. 20, 1964) is an intense, electric insomniac who works 18-hour days, delights in locker-room oratory, and hates anything dull, especially dull football. He has always had a knack for developing topnotch passers and receivers--"probably," cracks Navy Coach Bill Elias, "because his ancestors got practice catching figs that fell out of trees." At Northwestern, Ara produced Flanker Paul Flatley (now with the Minnesota Vikings) and Quarterback Tommy Myers (Pittsburgh Steelers); at Notre Dame in 1964, it was Quarterback Huarte and End Jack Snow (Los Angeles Rams). After Huarte and Snow graduated in 1965, Parseghian had to settle for grind-it-out ground attack; although the Irish lost only two games, he still shivers at the memory. "It was not," says Ara, "my cup of tea."

Hanratty and Seymour are not just a cup: they are a whole washtub--just what Ara ordered to flood new life into his Notre Dame attack, and maybe, just maybe, spark the Irish to the national championship he has been pining for ever since that last-game loss to Southern Cal knocked Notre Dame out of the No. 1 spot in the 1964 rankings. "Sure I want the title," Parseghian admits. "What else is there to shoot for, since we don't belong to any conference or go to post-season bowls?" In the meantime, though, he is playing it mighty cool with his sensational sophomores. "They have a lot of ability; that has been proven. Just give us credit for recognizing it," he says. "But how good they will be, only time will tell."

If Parseghian hadn't recognized the ability of Terry Hanratty and Jim Seymour, he would have had to be the most myopic football coach between Juarez and Sault Sainte Marie. By the time they were seniors in high school, they were two of the hottest young prospects in the U.S. Both were all-conference, all-state (Terry in Pennsylvania, Jim in Michigan) and All-America. And both got scholarship feelers from more than 40 colleges.

Jersey No. 42. At the Shrine of the Little Flower High School in Royal Oak, Mich., about five miles north of Detroit, Football Coach Al Fracassa announced last week that he was retiring No. 42, the blue and gold jersey worn by "the greatest athlete I've seen in ten years of coaching." No. 42 had been Jim Seymour, a gangling "big little boy" who was Shrine's version of Frank Merriwell. Son of a permissive, well-to-do oil-company executive, Jim had a more than ordinarily comfortable childhood: big, luxurious house, backyard swimming pool, a guitar to play folk songs on, and later the use of the family Pontiac (but not the Cadillac) to drive girl friends to the "sock hops" that Shrine staged on autumn Friday nights after the football games.

Even so, he must have worked up some antagonism somehow. In basketball, Jim was merely great: he made the Shrine varsity as a freshman, led the team in his senior year in foul shooting, assists and rebounds. In track, he was almost invincible: after the third meet of his sophomore year, he was never beaten in the high or low hurdles. A string of seven plaques hangs today on the wall of Shrine's gymnasium, listing the holders of school track and field records--and the name "J. Seymour" is on five. In football, he was pure gold. An ex-Michigan State quarterback, Coach Fracassa hadn't paid much attention to Jim when he turned out for the team as a freshman: he was just another uncoordinated, 165-lb. six-footer. Fracassa took another look after Jim worked out with a football all the next summer and reported back for practice at 6 ft. 3 in. and 175 Ibs.

Shrine was a small school playing in a tough conference, the Detroit Metropolitan Catholic League, and the usual headline the day after a game read: DIVINE CHILD CLOBBERS SHRINE. By the time Seymour was a junior playing both end and halfback and doing the punting, all that had changed. Shrine won six games, lost only one, and earned the right to play in the Soup Bowl against Notre Dame High School for the Catholic championship. As a senior, Jim caught 31 passes for 560 yds., picked up another 163 yds. in 31 carries as a halfback, and averaged 44.2 yds. per punt. The college offers poured in--from Michigan, Michigan State,

Toledo, Arizona, San Jose State. All they got back was polite no-thank-you notes. Jim Seymour had visited South Bend and talked to Ara Parseghian; he was going to Notre Dame. It was inevitable, he explained to his sister Mary Jane: "All the nuns at Shrine were praying I would go there."

Gym with Chairs. Terry Hanratty's route to South Bend from Butler, Pa., was more circuitous; he thought about going to Penn State--until he persuaded himself that he could not meet the entrance requirements and did not apply. Terry's parents had recently separated, and his grades were not all they might have been. (Notre Dame is tutoring him; his grade average is now up to 2.3--a C+--and he is even studying Russian.) But there was never any question about Hanratty's athletic ability. His older brother Pete, now 22 and a graduate student at Georgetown University, was a high school track star, and the Hanratty home was really a gym with chairs and a TV set. "Our living room was a boxing ring," remembers Sister Peggy, 21. "Our backyard was a baseball diamond. I was always stumbling over makeshift bases."

Yet Mrs. Edward Hanratty abhorred violence--including football. She refused to sign Terry's Midget League application when he was ten (he got a neighbor to sign it instead, quarterbacked his team to the championship), and she had never even seen him play until she tuned in to the nationwide telecast of the Notre Dame-Purdue game. Then she almost expired from fear that he would "fall on his face in front of all those people."

Not that Mrs. Hanratty isn't a sports fan: she named Terry after her favorite baseball player, St. Louis Cardinals Outfielder Terry Moore, and she played on the tennis team at Slippery Rock State Teachers College. Terry came on early and strong. He won two letters at Butler High in basketball. He pitched a no-hitter the first time he took the mound for the baseball team. He broke his brother's school high-jump record on his first try. And the fellow who really raised Terry's competitive hackles was a football quarterback from just down the pike in Beaver Falls, Pa., named Joe Willie Namath.

Hanratty had nothing personal against Namath--who was already off at Alabama building a reputation for flinging and swinging that would later win him a $400,000 contract with the pro New York Jets. What bugged Terry was that people were forever comparing him with Joe. Since Terry had deliberately patterned himself after Baltimore's Johnny Unitas, the classiest--and probably the quietest--of pro quarterbacks, he wasn't sure that the other comparison was much of a compliment. So the biggest thrill of his high school career was beating Beaver Falls 41-21--scoring a touchdown in the process on an 82-yd. quarterback sneak. The film of that game, forwarded to Notre Dame by a scout, may well have been the one Ara Parseghian was idly viewing one day at South Bend when he suddenly started to yell: "No. 11! Who's that No. 11? We've got to have him!" Thanks to qualms about Penn State, No. 11 was available.

Sidearm & Clamp. Hanratty and Seymour hit it off together early at South Bend. They patiently took their lumps as scrubs for last year's varsity (Notre Dame does not field a freshman team); then last winter they began slipping away at night to the Notre Dame field house for some serious get-acquainted sessions. Before that very first 42-yd. pass against Purdue could be completed, there were a lot of things they had to know about each other. For instance, what kind of delivery does Hanratty prefer? "I like to throw overhand, but if I'm being rushed, I sometimes do a sidearm"--because it is harder for onrushing linemen to block.

How does Seymour catch the ball? "It all depends on how high it is. But I like to get the ball in close to my body and clamp on it"--one hand on top of the ball, the other underneath. Where does Jim prefer the pass to reach him? "Anywhere but low. I don't like to catch it down low, because my face mask hinders me." How does Seymour handle the defensive man guarding him? "The first thing I do is go out and test him. If he isn't going to back up, I run right by him and say hello. But if he does, I'll cut the pattern short. It's a little bit of a bluff I try."

The learning process was slow, and sometimes painful. On one occasion, Hanratty launched an extra-hard bullet pass; Seymour caught it and broke both little fingers. But the private practice sessions began to pay off last May, in the annual game between the Irish and the alumni, when on the fourth play from scrimmage Hanratty hit Seymour with a 50-yd. clothesline scoring toss that spectator George Dickson, backfield coach of the pro Atlanta Falcons, called "one of the greatest passes I have ever seen."

Ara Parseghian could hardly have helped being impressed. If he was, he sure didn't let the boys know. Hanratty was competitive with Fellow Sophomore Coley O'Brien for the quarterback's job, and he still had a lot to learn. Endlessly, Terry practiced "quick release": dropping back, spotting Seymour, and firing, all in the space of 3 1/2 sec., the average time it takes a strong defensive lineman to penetrate a passer's protective pocket. When he got his time down to 3 1/2 sec., he began trying for 3 sec. Then Terry practiced varying the speed of his spiral: "When a man is wide open," he explained, "there is no sense barreling it in there. But when the defensive man is close enough to grab the ball, you can't allow for any floaters." He also memorized Seymour's habits, the timing of his cuts and fakes, so perfectly that he could say: "I can almost tell how he's going to go, in what direction, as soon as he decides."

Finally, three days before the Purdue game, Ara Parseghian walked up to Hanratty, tapped him on the shoulder and said: "You're it."

Nothing Complicated. Hanratty reacted just about the way any 18-year-old kid would. "Say," he asked Seymour on the day of the game, "are your hands wet?" Replied Jim, with all the confidence of his more advanced years: "Sure. Aren't yours?" It stands to reason that their palms have stopped perspiring by now; nothing ages a man like success, and practically everything they have tried has worked--so far.

There is nothing particularly complicated about Notre Dame's passing attack; the Irish run a grand total of six pass patterns. It is how they run them that hurts. Hanratty and Seymour killed Purdue with the "shake and go" (see diagram), so it was only natural that Northwestern the next week would do everything it could to keep Jim from getting loose in the deep secondary. So what did Seymour do? He curled out to the sideline on the "X" pattern and swung back on the "fishhook," made do with 15 yds. at a crack instead of one play all the way.

There was nothing wrong with the Army defense on the play that set up Notre Dame's first touchdown; Seymour simply took two defenders up in the air with him, came down with the ball all to himself for a 19-yd. gain. North Carolina's Tar Heels tried a new tack altogether: absolutely blanket Seymour and hang the cost. It got pretty expensive. With Jim keeping three North Carolina defenders busy on one side of the field, the Irish gleefully ran up and down the other side and scored two quick touchdowns. The Tar Heels gave up. They took the two extra men off Jim; on that very play, Hanratty chose to throw the shake to Seymour. Oklahoma may finally have discovered a way to stop Jim temporarily. But a sprained ankle is a sometime thing, and Seymour will be back in a week or so.

It was all easy, all great fun to Terry Hanratty. He could not understand why anybody thought throwing a football--especially to Jim Seymour--so special. When they voted him "Midwest back of the week," he was actually overwhelmed. "Gosh," he said. "I never thought it would turn out like this."

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