Sport: Scoreboard, Dec. 3, 1956

¶ After guiding Columbia University's football team through 27 years and 237 games. Coach Lou Little, 64, finally came to the time to retire (the record: in wins, 116 losses, 10 ties). Lately, Little's teams had been losing so often that he was almost beginning to believe that a noble effort is more important than winning. But for his final game, his team gave him the kind of performance any coach really prefers: it finished fast in the fourth quarter to beat Rutgers, 18-12.

¶ Just for kicks a pair of Pitt publicity men fed data on the upcoming game with Penn State into a mechanical brain—backfield speed, linemen's weight, comparative scores, even the years of tenure of each head coach. The "Type 650 Magnetic Drum Processing" machine digested the facts, hummed, clicked, calculated that each side of the equation could be evaluated by the figure 1. This, the P.R. men decided sadly, meant that the game would end in a tie. It did: Pitt 7, Penn State 7.

¶ Cold-numbed fingers and fumbles sent scores soaring on the nation's football fields. Iowa's Rose Bowl-bound Big Ten champions whipped Notre Dame. 48-8. Yale rolled to its first official Ivy League title by trouncing Harvard 42-14. Oklahoma's Sooners, still looking for a suitable opponent, smothered Nebraska 54-6 for their 39th successive victory. Tennessee stayed with Oklahoma on the unbeaten list with a 20-7 win over Kentucky.

¶ Looking back over the big-league baseball season, sportswriters decided that the 27 victories with which Pitcher Don Newcombe won the Dodgers the pennant far outweighed his dismal failure in the World Series. By a margin of 40 points over his aging teammate, Pitcher Sal Maglie, Big Newk was named the National League's Most Valuable Player of 1956.