Football at Harvard and at Yale

AT a time when so many eyes are watching the football contests at Cambridge and New Haven, it may be instructive to review the records of the two universities since 1889, and consider the method and policy under which the game has been developed at each university, and the results which have followed as a natural outcome.

Far from the shouting crowds of the Stadium, the quiet pages of this magazine furnish a good environment for such a study. Here, dispassionately, we can review Harvard and Yale football, not in a spirit of partisanship, but as a study of methods. What determines football supremacy? How has Yale met those conditions? How has Harvard met them? Why has Yale won the majority of the HarvardYale contests? — these are still questions of vital interest to graduates of the last twenty years, and to many lovers of sport.

At the outset let it be clearly understood that the present season is to be excluded from this consideration. Indeed we shall not want to commit the error of considering any one season by itself, but rather in a general way analyze factors and tendencies as they have developed from year to year. Nor do I mean to speak of individuals, but rather of collegiate units. We shall need to consider the class of men that football requires. To that end I want to show you the kind of work men are called upon to do. Whether one man or another best satisfies these demands is a matter about which each one of us will have his own opinion. In a review of methods we can afford to be impersonal, and since Time has safely banked the fires of enthusiasm, we may escape the temptation to dogmatize. Indeed, I wish that theories might be eliminated altogether, leaving only facts; but, unfortunately, the problem is not quite so easy as that. Some things we are sure of; others are merely deductions. I shall try to be conservative; I hope I shall be fair. Let us remember that it is only Harvard and Yale that we are considering. It is Harvard with respect to Yale; it is Yale with respect to Harvard.

In the thirty-four years that have elapsed since Rugby Football was introduced into this country, Yale and Harvard have played twenty-nine championship matches, and of these Yale has won twenty-three and Harvard four. Since 1889, when Harvard withdrew from the Intercollegiate Association, Yale has won thirteen times and Harvard four. These figures are too divergent to be accounted for by any theory of accident, though ‘Yale luck’ has passed into a proverb. No; it is a superficial view of the case which fails to see that underlying this long succession of victories there are significant facts concerning the methods and coaching of these Yale players who could take thirteen out of seventeen victories. It is with these facts that we are wholly concerned, and not with any criticisms upon them.

The situation at Harvard first attracts our attention. A wise man once said that he cared little to look at a winning crew after their victory, but he would go a long distance to study the faces of the men who finished in the second boat. So it is more interesting to study Harvard’s defeats than Yale’s victories, although we shall need to analyze the game of football before we can see the cause of either. So we look to Cambridge first, and surveying the last twenty years, the question is whether football at Harvard has been developing along right lines. Edward Atkinson once said that before you could judge whether any enterprise was going forward properly or not, you must ask of its managers one question: ‘What are you trying to do?' In other words, it all depends on what you want out of the game of football at Harvard. We must determine this before we can have a proper objective for any consideration of the subject. There seems to be some uncertainty in the minds of a portion of the public as to the object of football at Harvard. I quote an extract from an editorial which appeared in the Boston Daily Advertiser immediately after a recent Harvard-Yale game in which Yale was the winner: —

‘If the only reason for having an athletic sport at a university were to score a win against some other college, the thing might be very easily done. But that is not the right aim of college athletics. The main point is to have as many men as possible interested in the sport. The triumph over or defeat by other colleges is a secondary matter.

‘ Mr. —is a new man at football coaching. But he could see that the game should not be made a bone-breaking, crippling amusement for Harvard players, and he has done so very largely. He could see that the average college man should become interested in the sport; and that, too, has largely followed since he became coach. That is the result that is best worth having.'

Now, without for one moment denying the truth of this statement, I think it is a little begging of the question. Nothing has been brought forward to show that you cannot have victory and these other two things as well. Indeed, victory is quite dependent on keeping men in good physical condition, and also on seeing that the average college student becomes interested in the sport. Yale has well illustrated the truth of this. Let us not confuse the issue. It would be well to have more football victories at Harvard. Harvard will not get them while men are needlessly crippled or over-worked, nor, indeed, until their physical condition and nervous stamina are jealously conserved. It will not get them except under some plan which incidentally will interest the individual student, and keep him interested, whether he be player or spectator. But given these two things, then victory, by honest, clean methods, is, or ought to be, the object which Harvard men are trying to attain. Let us take these factors singly and see how far a careful consideration of all the evidence at hand will justify these rather startling percentages. We eliminate altogether from this calculation the element of chance, which is always present, and, of course, quite undeterminable by any law; and the theory of geographical location, which an eminent Harvard professor used to advance as a most interesting, if perhaps illogical, explanation of victory and defeat. We shall also omit all consideration of club politics, of so-called Harvard indifference, of the reputed influence of the Back Bay element, of the false charge that Harvard teams are quitters, and of that other charge that social standing unduly influences the selection of the team. These ‘ bogeys’ supply all needed explanation of their existence by furnishing fruitful topics for newspaper discussion, and in a serious consideration of football they have no place. No one who understands the technicalities of football need resort to them to find ample explanation of any defeat.

Yet during these last twenty years the average Yale-Harvard game has been the spectacle of eleven individual Harvard men playing their hearts out to win, and not winning. Even the careless observer could see that they lacked something. It reminds one of the story of the three thieves, who pounced upon a traveler by the roadside on a dark night, and after a most terrific struggle succeeded in overpowering him. On searching him, however, they found he had only five cents. One of the thieves turned to his companion and said, ‘ My God, Bill, that’s a narrow escape! If he had had a quarter, he would have killed us all!’

Harvard has been the man putting up a terrific fight with only five cents. If once Harvard could have had the quarter, or, in other words, the capital, it would itself have supplied the labor. The trouble has been that Harvard coaches have not sent their football teams on the field with the proper amount of capital, or knowledge of the finer points of the game, stowed away in the heads of the players. And the players have not received it for the very good reason that the coaches did not have it to give. But more of this later! Before we consider what that ‘ higher education’ is, let us take up the question, how important relatively is the factor of football science in a great game.

If we could analyze the average football victory of Yale, and trace it back to its responsible causes, I believe the factors which determine a victory, with the percentage of influence which each exerts, would be about as follows: —

Team (as between Yale and Har-

vard) 20 per cent

Captain 15 ,,

Head Coach and Assistants 25 ,,

Coaching of the Coaches 40 „

I have used percentage figures of probable or average conditions. Occasionally there comes along a captain whose influence may be credited with thirty-five or forty per cent. Some teams have been equal to an extra five or ten per cent in the total. But the above figures are fairly representative. Now to take up these four factors in succession.

First, the team. When the football season opens in September the ready writers of the daily press discuss eagerly the ‘chances’ of Harvard and of Yale. These chances are based on the available players at Cambridge and at New Haven. The impression left upon the reader is that the worth and extent of this material foreshadows the season’s outcome. I do not mean for a moment to underrate the ability or the intelligence of the eleven men chosen when I credit them with only twenty per cent of influence in the final result. The twenty per cent represents merely the difference between the individual (and as yet untaught) ability of the two sets of eleven men. Let us bear in mind that practically the same class of men go to Yale and to Harvard. The preparatory schools send to each university in about equal proportions. Sometimes Yale and Harvard men come from the same family; often they come from the same set or group. They are all merely potentialities. Perhaps Harvard has the best of the picking at the start, for from 1890 to 1900 it will be recalled that it was the Harvard Freshmen who usually beat the Yale Freshmen. None of these Freshman teams received expert coaching, and with this factor eliminated the conflict became one of individual ability, and the men of Harvard usually won. In these same years Harvard won most of the track meets. Here again it was a test of individual excellence. When I put the team at twenty per cent, it is the team at the beginning of the season. What the team is at the end of the season is the result of other factors in the equation. Few well-informed judges of football will deny that if Harvard and Yale swapped squads on September 25, the final result would remain unchanged. Taking these facts into consideration, I think we are setting it high enough when we say that the individual ability of the eleven untaught players is fairly represented as influencing twenty per cent of the result.

The second factor is the captain. Under this heading I place his qualities of leadership, his command over men, his powers of discipline, his ability to establish and maintain an esprit de corps, his forcefulness, his insight, and finally his common sense. The captain of a team is a very vital part of it, not merely because he may choose the head coach and so settle the policy of the season, but because in himself alone he is dominant. Men will do for a captain what no coach can make them do. He sets the pace. He shows the way; they follow. There are men so forceful, so filled with enthusiasm, and so obsessed by football, that it has been safe to pick them as winners a year ahead of the game, and in only one case have I ever known a team with such a captain to be beaten. Chadwick of Yale, as he was in 1902, was such a man. He made football vital for twelve consecutive months. It was an all-theyear-round game under Chadwick.

Right here a story occurs to me. Some years ago I went to Groton to referee a Groton-St. Marks match. It was the custom for the two teams to lunch together before the game, and any visiting official was usually placed at table between the two captains in order that they might make his acquaintance before going on the field. I found the St. Marks captain a most agreeable young fellow. He talked pleasantly and easily; football was to him a delightful game, and he was playing it for sport’s sake. On my other side was a man from whom I could scarcely get a single word during the entire meal. He was the Groton captain. He had, to use Kipling’s language, ‘ no time to burn on social repartee.’ He was grim, sombre, almost fierce, in his attitude. There was absolutely only one thing on his horizon that day; it was to win that game of football! With an earnestness which narrowed down the conversation with him to a single topic, there was also a determination as of one who felt that something which was his property had not yet been handed to him, and until it was in his actual possession he must be excused from speaking or even thinking on any subject. I was much impressed by the attitude of these two boys, and it was no surprise to me later in the afternoon when Groton beat St. Marks by the score of forty-one to nothing. Three years afterward that same man was elected captain of the Yale team, and I then (a year ahead of the date of the Harvard-Yale contest) ventured to predict his overwhelming victory. They laughed at me on all sides, yet Gordon Brown’s eleven is rated by many in New Haven as the second best that Yale has ever turned out.

We have had more than one case at Harvard, in the last twenty years, of the choice of an unsuitable captain mainly because he was popular — ‘a good fellow,’ so t o speak — one whom every one liked. It is a great mistake. Yale has rarely made this mistake. She has made it conspicuously on two occasions, but it is written down that that thing must not happen again. It was not his personal popularity as a good fellow which made Frank Hinkcy the captain of the Yale team for two years. It was because he was recognized as the keenest mind on football among all the members of that team; and, next to Walter Camp, he has been for the last fifteen years, in my judgment, the most valuable football authority on defense that Yale has owned. If one can generalize about this question of choosing a captain, I should say that Harvard has chosen her captains for their popularity or personal playing ability. Yale has looked almost wholly at football fibre and leadership. Yale is right, in my opinion.

We pass from the captain to a third fact or, the head coach, which is credited here with influencing the result to the extent of twenty-five per cent. Now I am going to suggest that we consider the third and fourth factors together. They do not belong together, and so I have recorded them separately. But Harvard has always tied them tight toget her, and in considering them from a Harvard view-point, it is not two factors you see, but one. At Yale you see two separate departments; at Harvard only one department. We will then consider them as two, but take them up together.

The third factor is the head coach: the man who is the brain and hand of the captain; the teacher, drill-master, critic, field-manager, guide, philosopher, disciplinarian, czar, and drudge — all in one. Assisting him (at both Harvard and Yale) is a corps of coaches, who work under specific instructions as to method and policy.

The fourth factor is the system. It is the coaching of the coaches. It is the School of Grand Tactics, which at Yale has been presided over for twenty years by Walter Camp. I shall try to show later just what this accomplishes to justify my crediting it with an influence of forty per cent on the result. I have called it the ‘system,’ for want of a better word, but it is really the tactical policy of the game.

During the earlier years of the period we are considering, it was the almost universal rule that a football team had but one coach. The game then had not been played years enough to have produced a sufficient number of men with the requisite knowledge to coach a team. The smaller Eastern colleges, and all the Western colleges, had but one coach each. But Yale, Harvard, and Princeton had, after 1891, an abundance of coaching material from which to draw, and the practice was established of appointing a head coach to be assisted by a succession of visiting graduates through the season, the men being invited to coach along special lines, and their attendance being secured at that stage in the season’s development when their especial work would be most effective. This practice has endured at Yale up to the present time, and has worked admirably, all things considered. The coaches who teach position-play come very early. The more valuable men, who can deal with the team as a unit, come about the middle of the season. The men who infuse spirit and fight into the playing (how such fellows as Rhodes, Tompkins, and Sanford used to do this!) get there toward the close of the season, while for the last ten days there come one or two past masters of football science whose judgment and expert knowledge place them at the very head of Yale coaching material. So Yale has managed, and still manages, her coaching.

The coaching force at Harvard has varied greatly in size in different seasons, and the coaching policy has been subject to repeated and radical changes. The accessibility of Cambridge has brought an embarrassment of material, and in the middle nineties it was no unusual thing to find from twenty to thirty coaches on the field. We used to say that any man who made a touchdown in the afternoon practice deserved double credit, first for getting through the opposing rush-line, and then for dodging the coaches. You will say at once that thirty is an impossible number. It is, and it is not. Sixty is not impossible, if they work together under powerful leadership. Three is too many if they do not. In any case, accepted and admitted leadership is essential, meaning by that a head whose decisions are unhesitatingly accepted, and for whose policy, right or wrong, every man labors.

Of course a coaching force of sixty, or even of thirty, is unwieldy. You realize it when you see the plan worked out. Such a horde of advisers demands a very forceful, tactful, intelligent, and highly alert leader. Here was Harvard’s chief difficulty for several years. With so many counselors, a head coach had more work reconciling his assistants’ opposing views than teaching the team. Then, too, there was a wide divergence of opinion, for they had been trained under different systems, and with no permanently accepted creeds. No man stood paramount, nor, indeed, was there one worthy of speaking the final word in the daily and nightly debates.

Unlike Yale, Harvard had no football traditions to guide her, and the important lessons of each year were not being worked out, collated, weighed, and filed away in the mental and written records of one man acting as a permanent, resident guardian of these treasures of experience and precedent, which finally crystallized into the accepted traditions of Yale football. During all these years at New Haven there was a system, and a head of that system; a man who was always in New Haven, who had at his finger’s ends every fact, figure, and deduction of every season, who was always available for advice; supremely a football man, both as player and tactician, a natural student of the game, who would ask no better enjoyment in the long winter evenings than the close study of possible developments of play in the light of the previous season’s experiences. And so from this established system there came down rules, methods, and policies which all Yale coaches tacitly accepted.

With these conditions clearly understood, we are not surprised to find that in the development of the elevens, from the opening day of practice to the final contest of the season, the path of Yale and the path of Harvard have been different in every respect. It is as if two men started from Boston to journey to the Stadium, and while one went to Bowdoin Square, and thence out along Main Street, the other went through the subway and over Harvard Bridge and Western Avenue. They arrive at their destination at about the same time, but their routes have been totally different. Let us take in turn a single example of these divergent methods in the matter of plays, of players, of training, and of schedule.

First, as to plays. In mastering her plays, Yale believes in perfecting the form of a play at the very start, however slowly it may go, and then speeding it up as fast as the slowest man can be quickened, but no faster. Thus Yale preserves her superb form. Harvard, on the other hand, gets speed and life into a play at the very start, albeit it is very ragged in form. Her effort is then directed, through the rest of the season, to perfecting the form without sacrificing speed. Yale is meanwhile perfecting the speed without sacrificing form.

Next, study their choice of players. Yale’s method has been to put in the hardest week’s work of the entire season at the opening of the football campaign in September. The available material is divided into small squads, and every man is tried out thoroughly by some player or coach. The men are rated, — not by what they can do, but what they may do; not by present performance but by future promise. Thus, breadth of chest, reach of arms, and exceptional strength around the loins, with the ability to carry one’s self in action with the quick coördination of the natural athlete, would count tremendously in a man’s favor at New Haven, regardless of whether he had ever played football or gave any promise of playing it. At Harvard, on the other hand, the men are given equal chances of demonstrating what they know, or can readily learn, of football per se; and the tendency is unconsciously to favor the present performer or the one who shows ready aptitude to take instruction. He is the choice over the better set-up, but less previously instructed or mentally alert player. In other words, Harvard sees the present player; Yale sees the future player. To use a simile, Harvard prefers a well-sharpened lead pencil; Yale chooses a pencil that has a good lead, and sharpens it herself.

Before the rule was made regarding Freshmen on varsity teams, Yale elevens contained a surprisingly large number of players who had first made the team in their Freshman year. It is evidence of the searching scrutiny which rarely overlooked a man who could by any effort of the coaches be made into a player.

Come next to the matter of physical training: here again the two universities have differed widely in their attitude toward their professional coach. Yale has supervised the policy of her trainer very closely, giving him on the whole less freedom than is given at Harvard. But, on the other hand, in one or two directions she allows him larger license than Harvard.

Finally, take the schedule of games. From 1890 to 1905, Harvard played yearly two important football matches,—those against Pennsylvania and Yale (with the substitution in 1895 and 1896 of Princeton in place of Yale). The rest of her matches were really practice games. Yale also, during most of this period, played two great matches —against Princeton and Harvard. Harvard always insisted that her Pennsylvania game (a major contest) should be two weeks ahead of her Yale game. Yale just as repeatedly insisted that her Princeton game should be one week ahead of her Harvard game, and in the years when she played both Harvard and Pennsylvania she played all three contests within ten days. Mr. Camp has assured me several times that Yale would not take the contract of playing Harvard and Princeton in one season, if the dates were a fortnight apart. Yet every effort to induce Harvard to set back her Pennsylvania game proved unavailing. In other words, Harvard has regularly brought her teams into approximately top form twice during each season. Yale brings her team into top condition once, and holds it there a week.

We come back to the factors of coaching and of system. There are, strictly speaking, three grades of football coaching. The first is ’individual’ coaching for fundamentals and position-play, which will include falling on the ball, tackling, kicking, catching, quick starting, blocking, opening holes in the line, interfering, carrying the ball, and in general all instruction on points of unrelated play. The second is the coaching of the team, and under this heading would come instruction as to the interdependence of positions, the relationships of endeavor, teamoffense and team-defense, the assignments and timings in the interferences, the timing of the line and the backs so that they work together, field tactics, signals, etc. This coaching involves the handling of the team as a unit, and it is much more difficult to do. Some of its problems call for ability of a high order. Ten men can coach positionplay to one that can pull the backs and the line together. Twenty men can coach position-play to one that can plan a correct scheme of interdependence on defense.

The general classification of this second grade of coaching is comprehended under the one term of ’teamplay.’ It is a recognized axiom in football that at a certain stage in the season’s development, individual coaching shall no longer interrupt the afternoon practice, but the team shall be handled strictly as a unit by the coachers of team-play. Harvard has always remembered Arthur Cumnock’s definition of team-play. He said it was the overplus, or surplus, of ability which a player could supply to the team beyond the amount which he needed to do his own work. In other words, it was the extra playing which he could contribute for the assistance of his neighbors, beyond what was required to cover his own position. The definition was valuable for its suggestive quality, but to my thinking it is strictly incorrect, and it illustrates the individualistic tendency which has always shown itself in Harvard football.

Team-play is not a collection of individual contributions, but something much more subtle. It is the subjection and the rejection of everything that is individual. It is a system of reflexes from man to man. It is the complete interdependence of the different individuals. Part of team-play is theory, and can be taught; part is only gained by familiarity through experience. For example, an end, on defense, sees an interference coming his way; he knows his own work, and he knows also what his adjoining neighbors, the tackle and rush-line back, have been told to do. He understands in what way he can depend on them. So much for theory. But now by close familiarity with the personalities of these neighbors, he understands to what exact extent he can depend on each one; by constant practice with them, by daily experience of them, he has learned how far he can rely on them; he feels their presence, even though he cannot see them; he knows instinctively as he advances that they are by his side or backing him up at a definite spot; he goes into the play with a wholly new confidence; he is really three men in one, for their effort is directly interlocked with his, and deep down in his consciousness he both knows it and feels it.

So much, briefly, for what team-play is, and the higher ability required to coach it. But now, above this coaching, there is yet something higher. There is the policy, or method, or system, which shall be taught. This is what I call the coaching of the coachers. It is the highest round of the ladder. It concerns the grand tactics of the game. It demands the insight to analyze the results of an entire season of intercollegiate football, and draw the correct lessons from it for the equipment of your next year’s team. It requires the capacity to plan an offense that shall be interchangeable, wellconcealed, speedy, and powerful It calls for the ability to plan a system of team-defense which shall take care of all possible plays of your opponents. It comprehends the knowledge of how a team ought to be brought along, and by what stages. In a word, it is the regulation and control of the whole coaching policy for the season. This work at Yale has been performed by Walter Camp. He created the Yale system, and his work has long represented, to my thinking, forty per cent of Agile’s successful results,

I suppose every football man has his own opinion about Walter Camp. I can give only my personal impression of him. I look back to the time when I was in active football work at; Harvard. It is many years ago. The men who are playing football on Soldier’s Field this season were then not long out of the nursery. Now I go still further back to the time when I first went out to Harvard to coach. That was years earlier. Again I go back, this time to 1889, when I first saw a game of intercollegiate football. Now, once more still further in my memory, to the years before I had ever seen a game of football, and in those remote years — over two decades ago — Walter Camp was known from one end of this country to the other as the ’Father of American football.' To-day he still retains both the name and the commanding position. For over twenty years he has been the final authority on the game in this country. He has forgotten more football than some of the men who coach to-day have ever known.

We must not make the mistake of calling Mr. Camp the head coach of Yale foot ball. Camp does not coach the Yale team. Yale, as we all know, has a different head coach each year — usually the captain of the preceding season. It has seemed to make little difference who coached the team, so long as Camp has coached the coaches. In the two years 1895 and 1896, Harvard and Yale failed to harmonize, and there was no Harvard-Yale game. It was during this period that Mr. Camp and I combined in joint authorship of a textbook on football. For nearly two years we met at frequent intervals and spent many hours discussing mooted points and differences of opinion. I was instantly struck by the fact that practically no proposition which I advanced was answered by him with an unconditional affirmative or negative. Every opinion was conditioned with wonderful foresight, for he saw every possible development and contingency. His appreciation of a situation was immediate and usually instinctive. He would detect a strategic error at sight. A single incident will illustrate this remarkable ability. In 1895 and 1896, the two years that Harvard did not play Yale, she played Princeton. The second game of this series took place on Soldier’s Field in 1896. Camp came to Boston to see the game, and I was glad to have the benefit of his advice. Ten minutes after the game had begun I went to him and asked his opinion of the probable outcome. The answer was immediate. ‘They are going to beat you,’ he said. ‘Don’t you see that they are playing with a different spirit? Harvard is playing to keep Princeton from scoring; Princeton is playing to score. Barring accident, Princeton will wind

When the first half was nearly finished without a score — I should say it must have been after about forty minutes of elapsed time — our left end was injured. The best substitute was sent in to take his place; he was a seasoned player who had been captain of the Harvard team the previous season. He had only one mania, — that was to beat Princeton; so I knew that his spirit would be a riotous one. The injured player left the line-up, and the two teams faced each other with the ball in Princeton’s possession on Harvard’s 24-yard line. I was looking at the two teams waiting for the signal from the referee for play to begin, when Camp suddenly turned to me and said, ‘Watch this play closely; it is going to be a touch-down for Princeton!' Five seconds after he had finished speaking the ball came back and a Princeton runner went through the Harvard line and down the field twenty-four yards for the prophesied score. In sheer amazement at his ability to call the critical play in advance, I turned to Camp for an explanation. He said it was perfectly simple. ‘I saw Princeton’s quarterback watching the man whom you sent on the field. That made me look at him. Your man was excited, like one who, playing on the end of the line, would defy caution, rush headlong into the defense, and over-run his man. As the Princeton quarter never took his eyes off your man, I suspected the play was going against him. It was a sure enough opening. The only question was, “Did the Princeton quarter see it?” Well,— he did!’

In other words, Camp saw two things; he saw the nervously-excited substitute, and he saw that the Princeton quarter saw him. And Camp rightly argued that he was proposing to send a play against him before he had a chance to steady down, with the possibility that he would allow himself to be drawn in while the runner with the interference went round his end. That was exactly what happened. The play was a brilliant one; the quarterback who detected the weak spot gave a still more brilliant exhibition; but to my mind the man on the side-lines, who reasoned the whole thing out in a coldblooded way, gave the most brilliant exhibition of all. Princeton won the game.

It is hard to speak correctly of Walter Camp’s value to Yale football without seeming to indulge in exaggeration. One of Yale’s best-known football captains summed up the situation to me once in this way. He said, ‘ When we want to know how the Yale team is doing at any time, we don’t go to the newspapers to find out. It makes very little difference to us what the players are doing; we want to know what the coaches are doing evenings. If they are going up to Walter’s every night, then we know the team is going to be a good one.’

This little story throws an interesting side-light on the Yale system. For years during the period of which I speak, it was the custom of the coaches at New Haven to assemble in the evenings at Mr. Camp’s house. There all the differences in the day’s experience, all points in dispute, all decisions in regard to the make-up of the team, all matters of development and policy were thrashed out, with Mr. Camp advising, supplying data, giving reasons for every proposed action, passing upon the merits of the arguments, and charting the course that seemed best to follow. Sometimes the coaches have drifted away from Mr. Camp. It was passively so in 1898, and Yale failed. There was a more active separation from Mr. Camp in 1901, and Yale was decisively defeated.

The best work of such a man is usually accomplished between December 1 and May 1. In other words, the substructure of Yale football is laid in the preceding winter. The results of the season just ended are carefully collected and analyzed; not merely the results of the Yale team, but of all the other leading teams of the country. This great mass of information is carefully separated, and the important results are worked out, so that by the end of January he has reduced to a few cardinal points the lessons for Yale in the history of the preceding season. He has analyzed every new principle or method of attack and defense which the different teams have developed. Any good point, any important discovery, any novel or ingenious method of attack, any clever ruse for disguising the point of attack, —in fact, all that the active minds of football men all over the country have produced, are noted down by him. With this as a basis, he sees the tendency and needs of the coming season. He looks at the preponderance of attack under the working of the new rules, and plans accordingly. He sees that heavier backs are now needed, and plans accordingly. He decides how far the kicking game can be carried, and in what sections of the field, and at what stages of the game. He weighs the possibilities of forward passing and on-side kicking. More important than all these is his mastery of a powerful, direct, line attack, which can be depended upon for consistent gains when nearing the opponents’ goal. Yale always has this last development of the game; she always has it carefully revised to date, and as she executes it we can never fail to see that its power is no accident, but the result of most careful, systematic, and intelligent thought.

From January till the end of April, then, these questions are considered and worked out. I believe the same plan is followed, to a certain extent, at some of the smaller colleges. I do not think that it has been followed at Harvard, except in rare cases. It ought to be followed. The importance of preparing for the conflict far in advance of its coming is as vital in football as in war. Personally I believe that by the time college opens the result of the Yale-Harvard game in November is practically settled. Do not misunderstand me! I do not mean that any one lives who has the information to forecast the result. I merely mean that by the end of September the cards have been dealt for the game, so to speak, and that, barring accidents of exceptional nature, fortunate or unfortunate, the hands are played out in the orthodox manner. I know this sounds like an extreme opinion, but I should like to argue the point over a cigar with any one who cares to discuss it. I mention Mr. Camp’s doings at such length because I want to make clear the position he occupies, the work he does, and the methods and time he employs. At Harvard, in the past, one man has combined the work of Mr. Camp with the work of the head coach. Practically no one has shared his responsibility. Overworked and overworried, public clamor can compel such a man, unless he is made of iron, to a change of policy, often directly contrary to his own judgment. But if public criticism arises at Yale, there is a system and there are traditions to confront and restrain it, while behind the captain and head coach is the force of Camp and the prestige of the past. Yale can overcome criticism before which Harvard would be constrained to act. And criticism is bound to come. Let me give a single illustration.

The incident I am going to relate is the situation which existed at Yale in the year 1900. Pennsylvania had been using her famous ‘guards back’ play, and its success had roused Camp to the discovery of a new principle in attack which, as he elaborated it more and more, gave promise of remarkable results. It was not merely a new play or formation; it was something much more fundamental, and, like all of Mr. Camp’s plays, it showed very little of its real power on the surface. Through the winter of 1899-1900 he developed the possibilities of his new attack till it was a model of flexibility, and about April or May he called in Brown, the captain of the next, year, and McBride, who had been selected as head coach. He told these two men he had plans for the coming season which he believed would insure a very powerful Yale eleven, but that they wrere plans which would involve a slow advancement during the first half of the season, with a very rapid development in the last two weeks. In other words, it was such a game as must be taught with correct form regardless of any speed in the early season. Any other method would be sure failure. He called their attention to the fact that if they adopted his plan there would unquestionably be severe criticism of the playing of the team during the first four weeks of the season, and for that reason he wanted a promise from them that they would keep their own counsels, trust his judgment, and see the thing through, regardless of criticism. Both men promised, and Camp explained to them in detail his principle as he had worked it out.

The mid-season at Yale found everything exactly in accordance with Mr. Camp’s prophecy. The Yale team was characterized as the slowest and poorest that Yale had turned out in years. The culmination came on October 27 when they played Columbia in New York and won an indecisive game, 12 to 5. Then they played West Point and were barely able to pull out a victory, though the score, by remarkably good luck, was worked up to 18 to 0. Criticism now became violent and general. Even the coaches openly complained. Both Brown and McBride were assailed by many of the Yale alumni. A change in the policy of the season was demanded. The newspapers pointed out the hopelessness of the situation, and said that it was clear that the team was not being developed properly, and that the attack was weak and ineffective.

At this point McBride began to hesitate, and in his anxiety he consulted some of the older captains and coaches at Yale. He told them frankly — but only in general terms —what the true situation was (he made no disclosure of his specific policy), and the answer which he received from these men was this: ‘The season certainly looks strange, and the team seems very unlike a Yale team. But if Walter says it’s all right, it probably is all right. He has never failed to give good advice in the past, and regardless of criticism we should follow his advice literally, without hesitation.’

McBride was satisfied, but the greater test of his faith was yet to be made. Yale had now reached the point of the Indian game. The Indians were very strong that year, and bets were freely made that they would defeat Yale. Camp now announced to Brown and McBride that he wished them to play the Carlisle game with four substitutes on the team, one of whom was a full-back and a very inferior man to the regular kicker. Brown and McBride, in distracted anxiety, pointed out to him that the team had barely been able to win their victories up to this point, that Carlisle was exceptionally strong this season, and that it was inviting certain defeat to go against them with four substitutes on the team. Camp told them that he would stake the accuracy of all he had said to them on this one game, and he added (just mark the absolute confidence of the man!): ‘The time has arrived for the team to find itself. You will beat Carlisle! And it will not be a close score; it will be a decisive victory. You will score on them at least three times.’ Yale played that game with the four substitutes, and the score was 36 to 0 in favor of Yale. The tide turned with a great rush. New Haven went crazy with joy. The team ‘came’ so fast in the next few days that you could almost hear them coming. The following Saturday they played Princeton, and won by the record-breaking score of 29 to 5; the next Saturday they defeated Harvard by another recordbreaking score of 28 to 0.

When the season closed there was tremendous enthusiasm among Yale men for their eleven. It was declared to be the second best team that Yale had ever developed, and many rated it as the best team the university had produced. Yet there was a very dark hour in the development of that team, and under less accepted leadership a shift of policy in mid-season would have been almost inevitable. Of course, such a change would have spelled the ruin of the team.

That is the inside history of the development of Yale’s now famous tandem-taeklc play. You wonder perhaps that the Yale enthusiasts did n’t recognize the true character of that vicious attack earlier in the season. But few men did. What Camp himself thought he never said; but three months after the season of 1900 closed, he came into my office in Boston one day, and in the course of a talk over the developments of the previous season, he asked me if I thoroughly understood the tandem-tackle play of Yale. I thought for a moment, and then told him that I did not. His reply was, ’I wondered what you would answer. I know that no ot her man at Harvard knows that attack, and I am going to show them next year that they don’t, understand it.’ The tandemtackle play was copied more or less accurately by all the Eastern colleges, including Harvard, the next year, and has been the strongest scrimmage formation of the last eight years.

Yale’s plays always look so simple, and they are so complex! Harvard saw that tandem-tackle play repeatedly in the Yale-Princeton game, and every Harvard coach present, with a single exception, thought that any team that could stop ‘guards back’ could surely stop this tandem on tackle. But the principles of the two attacks were totally different, and few men have ever reasoned out the cause underlying the great power of the tandemtackle. Harvard used seventeen men in that Yale game, and some of them came out of the contest comparatively fresh, but forced to withdraw because of the severe strain across the loins which came from repeated ‘pocketing’ cleverly contrived in the shifting point of attack.

Butterworth’s famous dive-play, which won the ’93 game at Springfield, was another example of Yale complexity in a simple garb. George Stewart, who was then the Harvard tactician, came to me in the middle of the game and said, ‘If you don’t do another thing this afternoon, chase up and down the side-lines and get hold of what that play is.’ I started. Within fifteen minutes he joined me. By that time I had unraveled the signal for the play and was able to tell Stewart in advance each time it was coming. We both dropped every other thought and ‘plugged’ for that play. Stewart thought he had it at last, but he was n’t in sight of it. We never gave it up till the whistle blew. The play could n’t be fathomed, though we studied it afterwards for days and weeks. It looked so simple! For two years that play was the one thing I wanted to understand before I died. Then one day Camp and I were picking out some plays for school teams, and I said, ‘Why not give them that Butterworth dive?’ He said, ‘Do you think they could play it?’ I said, ‘I could better express an opinion if I understood the play. ’ And then he showed it to me. It was Camp’s adaptation in scrimmage form of my own principle of the previous year — the flying wedge; but it was twice as powerful, because his wedge was kept very sharp, and inside it was Butterworth, Yale’s greatest hurdler. The play was practically built round the wonderful ability of Butterworth to hurdle.

We must bring our study of football to a close, for the limits of a magazine article do not permit of fuller elaboration, and into criticism or constructive suggestion this review does not seek to go. Enough has been presented to show, during the years we are considering, continuity and a definite system at Yale, with a lack in both method and continuity at Harvard.

I believe that Harvard at last realizes the true situation, and perhaps the next few years may see a foundation laid for something better than the old rule, ‘Let any one tackle the tactics who cares to try.’ May Fortune speed that day!