Football: Mid-Season

(See front cover) If a stadium were built big enough to hold all the U. S. football public at one time, it would be big enough to hold the entire population of Chicago, Paris, or of Rome, Hamburg and Glasgow put together. Its breath rising in a vast faint mist, its shout like the roar of an earthquake, its tiered ranks veiled with the smoke of innumerable cigarets, its tremendous stare as heavy as sunlight, this crowd in its fabulous coliseum has no equal in the world. Once the crowd was one-quarter its present size. It was composed of undergraduates, parents, alumni, their wives, sweethearts, cousins. For years it has been growing until it has come to include every element in the country. Last year 450 college teams played games, 15,000 players participated, 1,400 games were played, 3,000,000 tickets were sold, the gate receipts were approximately $10,000.000. This year the figures may be even bigger. More than ever before it has become evident that the public, taking possession of a game which was once the private property of the colleges, lias changed it almost unrecognizably. College graduates often grumble about the changes. If they forget to fill out their applications for tickets to the big annual game of their college, they may have to pay scalpers as much as $50 for a seat. They find themselves sitting next to people who have never been to any college but have secured six tickets at box office prices through some young collegian in their offices. They see college boys exploited in the newspapers, their size, heft, parentage, personalities analyzed. They grumble, only partly mollified by the knowledge that out of the huge gate receipts of football their colleges get funds to support other forms of athletics. The track team gets its carfare, the crew its costly shells out of the coffers filled by great Football. Recently Yale men were asking in their alumni weekly that football be restored to normal. Last week the alumni committee on athletics at the University of Pennsylvania charged in its annual report that college football has become "a contest between professional coaches and their systems," that it shows signs of becoming a "racket." Meanwhile the non-collegiate Public, considering football its own property by virtue of the money it spends on it, last week thought of a new use for the game A dentist wrote a letter to a Hearst sport colyumist* suggesting that colleges play charity games to help the unemployed. Many newspapers were taking up the idea simultaneously. Football formally became a factor in the nation's most vital economic issue when the sports editor of a Manhattan tabloid† went to Washington to ask President Hoover to order the Army and Navy teams to play a benefit game the entire receipts of which—estimated at $1,000,000—could be used to relieve men who could find no work. The University of Michigan announced that its receipts from the game with Chicago next week will be given to charity. New York University, Carnegie Tech and other colleges offered to play charity games. Last week on its many fronts, football was at the height of its season. Public interest focused on the ten great unbeaten teams of the country: Notre Dame greatest of all; Army and Dartmouth in the East; Alabama's bucking Crimson backfield and Georgia in the South; North western and Michigan in the Midwest Conference; Oregon and Washington State on