College football: then and now

In my dusty attic I keep a stack of college football yearbooks, individual game programs, my personal football scrapbook (kept in 1939), and other similar paraphernalia dating mostly from the 1930’s and 1940’s. (This is the same dusty attic in which I found the Emily Post book Etiquette, which was the subject of my previous posting “Proper manners: then and now” on 11/16/06.)

Thumbing through the pages of Illustrated Football Annual for 1940 and the Street & Smith’s Football Yearbook for 1940, so many differences between college football then and now come to the eye.

Race/ethnicity of players. Each of these publications has numerous photographs of individual players as well as action photos of games from 1939. In the Illustrated Football Annual, with two possible exceptions, every player was white and none had ethnic names other than some denoting Polish ancestry. (The two possible exceptions as to all white players—their black-and-white photos weren’t conclusive—were one Lou Montgomery, a back at Boston College, and Jerry Courtney, a back at Syracuse.) The Street & Smith Yearbook did better: it pictured Jackie Robinson, who was a back at UCLA before he went on to fame as the first black to break the baseball color barrier in 1947 when he played for the Brooklyn Dodgers.

The latter publication also went on to mention a Kenny Washington, a halfback, also at UCLA, who had graduated after the 1939 season. It went on to refer to Washington as a “great Negro halfback whom Western critics agreed was a finer back than any other in the West,” and to Robinson as “another Negro star of 1939…” Also pictured was a black player, an Archie Harris, a back at Indiana, of whom it said that he “gets praise for defensive play.” Today, it appears from watching football on TV, that more than half the college and professional players are black.

The Street & Smith Yearbook also described a pictured player at Oklahoma as an American Indian, saying about him: “Palefaces took land from his forefathers, and winning it back, yard by yard, for the Oklahoma team is Jack Jacobs.” It is hard to imagine such a comment in today’s politically correct world.

Size and weight of players. I guess that the average lineman (offensive and defensive) on the NCAA-IA teams (the major schools) today weighs somewhere between 230-260 pounds; of course, this average includes the few scrawny ones who weigh around 215 along with the behemoths of well over 300 pounds. The backs probably average well over 200, probably 210-220.

Let’s look at the weights of the No. 2 and the no. 3 teams in the country in 1939 as ranked in the Illustrated Football Annual for 1940 (more about the ranking system below). I don’t know who the no. 1 team was because my copy of the publication has the last few pages missing—the alphabetical listing stops with Southern California--so the no. 1 team must have been somewhere between S and Z. No. 2 was Cornell, whose 16 lineman averaged 191 pounds (the heaviest was 222) and 12 backs averaged 182 (the heaviest 205). No. 3 was Southern California, who had 17 linemen at an average 199 (the heaviest 221) and 12 backs who averaged 184 (the heaviest 197). A tackle at Harvard was of such spectacular weight that he was described as “Gargantuan Vern Miller, 265 pounds of beef on the hoof…”

Endicott Peabody III, a former governor of Massachusetts, was an All-American guard at Harvard in 1941, at a hefty 185 pounds—in fact, he was given the nickname of “Chub.” During the Jimmy Carter administration in the late 1970’s he had an appointed post in Washington (I forget just what it was), at which time I chanced to be seated next to him at a luncheon there. I told him that I remembered his football career, and brought up the difference in the weight of college players during his time and those of the current time; he told me that his son had tried out for the Harvard team when he weighed about 200 pounds, but was cut because he was too light.

Uniforms. Helmets were less round back then, they were more like crowns, and had no face masks (except for the occasional player who had had a broken nose or other facial injury). Jerseys were long-sleeved, unlike the short sleeves of today, and rarely had any markings other than the player’s number on the front and back—there were no school names, no players' names, no numbers on the sleeves. There were no school initials or other adornments on the helmets. Players didn’t wear gloves. And players on a team wore the same socks, usually white anklets or, less often, knee-length socks along with the white anklets. But all of them on the team wore the same—unlike the sloppy mess today of some teams whose players wear short, ugly, black anklets that barely come over the shoe top, while others on the same team wear white or black knee-length socks without accompanying anklets.

Officials. In the old days there were four officials: referee, umpire, head linesman, and field judge—about the same basic positions as today, except that now there are also line, back, and side judges. The officials wore the same striped shirts back then but didn’t have numbers on them. Of course, there were no instant replays whereby the officials could review their calls.

Other differences. Back then there was no electronic real-time communication between the coach, an assistant coach in the upper stands to call plays, and the quarterback. In fact, at one time there was a penalty for “coaching from the sidelines.”

Before there was TV, radio broadcasts of games required more skillful announcers and imaginative listeners.

Football stadiums were often named after wealthy alumni who had financed their construction, or enlargement. There were no corporate-named fields.

Prior to World War II, there were just five bowl games: Rose, Sugar, Cotton, Orange, and Sun. The first post-WW II bowl was the Gator Bowl in Jacksonville, Florida, which began on January 1, 1946 (two other bowls also opened that year but didn’t survive). There were no corporate-named bowl games, as there are today.

Teams in the 1930's and 1940's played from the wing formation (single wing right, single wing left, double wing). An exception was Stanford, who in 1940 started the "T" formation, with Frank Albert at quarterback. Around 1950 teams began to shift to the "T" and the shotgun.

Today a player on a team may be in any class from freshman to senior. Not so prior to World War II--then, freshmen at a college had their own team, which played a schedule against freshman teams at other schools; only when they became sophomores were they eligible for the varsity.

There was no two-point conversion back then.

Players didn't have tattoos.

Football teams weren't referred to as "programs."

Low scoring then, high scoring now. Many games during the 1930’s and 1940’s ended with low scores--14-7, 10-3, 7-6 were typical, especially among evenly matched teams; 20, 30, or more points by one team usually were in mismatches where that team was playing a weak opponent. There were even some 0-0 ties (those were the days before the tie-breaker rule). An example is the 7-3 victory of Southern California over Duke in the 1939 Rose Bowl.

Today scores are likely to be double-digit points on both sides—the 42-39 victory of Ohio State over Michigan, the no. 1 and no. 2 teams in the country respectively at the time of their meeting on Nov. 18, 2006 , had a lot of scoring even for today, but wasn’t unusual. Why, then, today’s higher scoring?

Higher scoring is usually indicative of more skilled players on the participating teams. It seems there are better players today because (1) there is a larger pool of high school players that colleges can recruit (just because the general population of the country is much larger); (2) every team today has three platoons—offense, defense, and special teams—whereas teams in earlier periods usually had an eleven-man first-team that played most of the entire sixty minutes of a game, while second and third-team players were used sparingly; and (3) in the earlier years there were almost no black players (except at black colleges), whereas today they are a majority of the team at just about every college in the country.

National Rankings. Today only the top 25 teams in the country are ranked as the season progresses—the rankings are by four different groups, of which the Associated Press rankings are the oldest and the most often referred to as the football season progresses. However, every team in the Illustrated Football Annual for 1940 was given a national ranking for the 1939 season, which was done by an “AZZIRATEM System,” a system about which no information was provided (since the system functioned long before there were computers, it must have required a tremendous amount of manual number-crunching).

As mentioned above, Cornell was no. 2 and Southern California no. 3 in 1939 (because of missing pages, I can’t find no. 1). Duke, which rarely wins a game today, was no. 5 in 1939. Today’s no. 1, Ohio State (as of this writing), was no. 16 in 1939; no. 2 today, Michigan, was no. 17; Southern California is no. 3 today and was the same in 1939; Notre Dame, no. 6 today was no. 8 in 1939.

Florida State was nowhere to be seen in the 1940 yearbooks. The reason, as I learned from the school's website, was that football there had been abandoned in 1905 and was not started up again until 1947.

The highest (worst) ranking in 1939 was Hartwick College’s 529, who lost 6 games and tied 1 (at 0-0) and went scoreless in 4 games and scored only 21 points all season; it has done a little better this year at 4-6. Second worst was Blue Ridge College’s 513, whose record was 2-6; it went scoreless in three of its games and only scored 36 points all season; the school went out of business in 1944. The third worst was N.Y. State University at Buffalo at 503; it hasn’t done much better this year, having won only two of its twelve games. Fourth worst was University of Rochester at 458, who lost all 7 of its games, going scoreless in 5 of them and scoring only 12 points all season; however, it has done considerably better this year, having won 7 of its 11 games. (As mentioned above, I am missing pages with part of the letter S through Z, so there could have been some worse rankings, but, if so, I would just as soon not know about them.)

Former teams that don’t exist today. The following schools fielded teams in 1940 but don’t now (their national ranking in 1939 is in parentheses): Bradley Tech (118), City College of N.Y, now City University of New York (468), Drexel Tech (380), Manhattan College (54), Marquette University (77), New York University (45), Niagara University (319), St. Bonaventure (265), Scranton University (80), University of San Francisco (99), University of Detroit (38), and the hapless Blue Ridge College referred to above. There are probably others that I didn’t catch.

It' good to see that Hartwick College played just as good back then as they do now. --Posted by Nominal Me to Rambling Musings of Mycroft Watson at 11/26/2006 08:56:39 AM

Hey, Nominal Me, Hartwick should be commended for its consistency. My alma mater, University of North Carolina, was 9 wins, 1 tie my senior year (1948 football season); this year they are 3-7. Mycroft

Proper manners: then and now

While rummaging among some dust-covered books in my attic recently, I came across Etiquette by Emily Post, which was originally published in 1922.Mrs. Post was well-known to most us of advanced years as the final word on manners, good and bad. Some of her pronouncements make good sense today, others seem quaint, and yet others appear affected, even for 1922.

Following are some of her choice pointers:

Proper dress for male college students. The best description of a college boy’s clothes would be that they were those which suit his type (she doesn’t provide any description of the “type” she has in mind). In its best expression it is merely the result of rather loosely fitted clothes that have a comfortably worn look, a collar not too high nor too tight, tie neither too thick nor too stiff, comfortable woolen socks and thick-soled shoes. (p. 734).

Proper dress for female college students. Here Mrs. Post talks of knit skirts with matching blouses, “two suits of tweed…and several sweater blouses of varying lengths.” And, of course there must be evening gowns for formal occasions and, also, “a dress or two to wear under a coat to church on Sundays or to town for lunch on Saturdays.”

One has to laugh at these dicta—a collar not too high, a necktie; knit skirts and matching blouses, sweater blouses--when one sees college students today. Most likely they are wearing blue jeans (with ripped-out holes around the knees) or shorts, along with Army surplus flack jackets, work shoes of the type worn by laborers or $120 name brand sneakers, and T-shirts with all manner of inscriptions on them. And, of course, baseball-type caps (often turned backwards).

When I was a college student back in the 1940’s the attire called for by Mrs. Post was pretty much the standard. Both by my recollection and by looking at my college yearbooks, men wore long trousers, button-up shirts (sometimes, incredibly, with a necktie) or T-shirts in warm weather with no inscriptions on them other than maybe the name of the college in small letters around the pocket (and perhaps the football team’s mascot). And, oh yes, they usually wore white buckskin shoes (loafers were a secondary choice).

College women most often wore skirts and sweaters and saddle Oxford shoes. Slacks were only worn for picnics and other very informal social occasions.

Hallmarks of a “gentleman.” Mrs. Post sets all manner of booby traps around the man who aspires to be a gentleman; he had best write them down and study them daily lest he inadvertently trip up one day and forfeit that distinction.

The honor of a gentleman demands the inviolability of his word and the incorruptibility of his principles; he is the descendant of the knight, the crusader; he is the defender of the defenseless and the champion of justice—or he is not a gentleman. (p. 616)

A very well-bred man intensely dislikes the mention of money and never speaks of it (out of business hours) if he can avoid it. (p. 616)

A man of honor never seeks publicly to divorce his wife…but for the protection of his own name, or that of the children, he allows her to get her freedom…the man who publicly besmirches his wife’s name, besmirches still more his own, and proves that he is not, was not, and never will be, a gentleman. (p. 617)

No gentleman goes to a lady’s house if he is affected by alcohol. (p. 617)

A gentleman does not bow to a lady from a club window; nor according to good form should ladies ever be discussed in a man’s club! (p. 617). Hey, I can get by on that one—I have never bowed to a lady from a club window. Nor have I discussed ladies in a club, mainly because I never knew anything titillating enough to interest anyone in a club (also because I have only belonged to two clubs, each for only a brief period of time).

Introduction of a gentleman to a lady. The genteel way for a gentleman who is visiting or moving to a city new to him, and wants to meet a lady in that city, is to obtain a letter of introduction from a mutual friend. However, there are strict rules to be followed:

A letter of introduction is handed you (the gentleman) unsealed, always. It is correct for you to seal it at once in the presence of its author…If you are a man and your introduction is to a lady, you go to her house as soon as you arrive in her city, and leave the letter with your card* at her door, without asking to see her. (This obviously means that she has a maid or some other servant who will answer the door.) She should—unless prevented by illness—at once invite you to tea or to lunch or to dinner or at least name an hour when she will receive you. ( p.20)

* According to Mrs. P., everyone older than a toddler must have a visiting card; she even prescribes their dimensions (one set of dimensions for a married woman and another for “very young girls”). “That very little children should have visiting cards is not so ‘silly’ as might at first thought be supposed,” she says. “Many mothers think it is good training in social personality for children to have their own cards, even though they are used only to send with gifts and upon very rare occasions.” (p. 115)

Highway etiquette. In addition to common sense actions while driving a car, such as avoiding impatient maneuvers or giving in to road rage, she lists the signals that drivers should give by sticking their left arm out the window: hand held flat (slowing down or stopping), finger pointing straight out (left turn), arm bent at the elbow with hand raised (right turn). I well remember those signals from the days when I first drove a car—there were no built-in turn signals or rear lights flashing as the brakes were applied.

On Mrs. Post. According to the on-line encyclopedia Wikipedia, she was born Emily Price into a high-society family in Baltimore in 1873. At age 19 she married Edwin Main Post, a society banker in New York, and had two sons by him; they were divorced in 1905 (when she was 32) “due to her husband’s infidelity.” She wrote books and magazine articles on various topics, but her Etiquette was by far her most successful work. She died in 1960 at age 86.

The latest edition of Etiquette (apparently its 18th, published in 2006) is available through on-line booksellers.

Less creativity in this year's elections mudslinging

Although the mudslinging during this year’s election season was as nasty as ever, it didn’t seem to be as creative. Consider the following zinger said to have been made by Senator Smathers of Florida fifty or so years ago when he was addressing an audience of rubes in a rural part of the state.

“I want you to know that my opponent is a thespian. And not only that, he engages in nepotism with his sister.”

I didn’t see or hear one this year to match that in creativity.

The agony caused by 537 votes

With the November 7th election results in—and with the closeness of some of the races—now is a good time to reflect on the agony that 537 votes has caused. Yes, FIVE-HUNDRED-THIRTY-SEVEN--not 537 thousand, just plain 537. One race this week was reported to be too close to call when there was a difference of about seven thousand, with a few ballots left to count (the Webb-Allen Senate race in Virginia).

Yes, just 537 votes was the total by which George Bush was finally reckoned to have beaten Al Gore in Florida in the 2000 presidential race (after a delay of 36 days as hanging chads, punched holes, and other eccentricities of the Florida ballots were dealt with). By winning Florida’s 25 electoral votes, Bush’s edge was a mere 5 electoral votes (271 to 266).

Note: According to History of American Presidential Elections 1789-2001 (vol. XI), edited by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Fred L. Israel, and William P. Hanson, Chelsea House Publishers, Bush received 2,912,790 votes in Florida to Gore's 2,912,253—a difference of 537.

It is hard to imagine that just 537 alleged voters were responsible for all the misery that the election of George Bush has inflicted on our country, and on Iraq. Of course, we will never know what Al Gore’s performance as president might have been, but I can’t conceive of his having caused more damage than Bush has done. (Anyone interested in the reasons for my disparagement of Bush’s presidency can find them in my 5/20/06 posting “The Worst President in History?” under the paragraph headed My charges against Bush.)

Recent readings: "What Terrorists Want: Understanding the Enemy, Containing the Threat"

What Terrorists Want: Understanding the Enemy, Containing the Threat by Louise Richardson, Random House, New York 2006, 312 pages

In her book Ms. Richardson makes a strong argument for not being carried away by fear and loathing of terrorists’ atrocities in the United States on 9/11 and in other countries around the world. She is a lecturer at Harvard and is dean of Harvard’s affiliate the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Rather, she says, we of the western world should make a genuine effort to understand the motivations of the terrorists and to devise rational ways to protect ourselves from them. She talks not only of Islamic fundamentalist terrorists but also of other terrorist organizations in other places and times: the Shining Path in Peru, the FARC in Colombia, the Basque ETA in Spain, the Japanese cult that released deadly sarin gas in the Tokyo subway in 1995, the Irish Republican Army, the Red Brigades in Italy, and others.

First, she makes the argument that terrorists are not greatly different emotionally from the rest of us.

...terrorists...are, by and large, not crazy at all...the one shared characteristic of terrorists is their normalcy, insofar as we understand the term...Some are introverted, some extroverted: some loud, some shy; some confident, some nervous...Terrorists see the world in Manichean, black-and-white terms; they identify with others and they desire revenge. They have a highly oversimplified view of the world in which good is pitted against evil and in which their adversaries are to blame for all their woes. (p. 41)

Most of the leaders of the Islamic militants are well educated, many with advanced university degrees. Three conditions are usually required for the making of an individual terrorist: dedication to a cause, an enabling structure (an organization for him to join), and an overarching ideology.

The author discusses the question of the extent to which states sponsor terrorist organizations–she argues that generally “terrorism is the behavior of substate groups”. But she does contend that some countries do, at certain times, sponsor terrorist groups; the Soviet Union and Cuba did so in the 1970's, Iran and Libya in the 1980's, and Iraq and Syria in the 1990's. And the USA would, in the opinion of those in the world who dislike us, also fall into that category given our support of the Contras in Nicaragua, the mujahedin in Afghanistan, those who would overthrow Castro in Cuba, and those who did overthrow Allende in Chile.

More and more impoverished people in the world resent the USA because of our wealth:

With global mass communications and American TV shows broadcasting American affluence around the world, it is not difficult to mobilize a sense of resentment of American wealth. Previously one compared oneself to others nearby, but the contrast between American wealth and Arab poverty is now being broadcast daily into people’s tiny homes. (p. 56)

In a chapter entitled “Why the War on Terror Can Never Be Won” the author comments:

When the history of the immediate post-9/11 years comes to be written, it will be seen as a period marked by two major mistakes and two major missed opportunities. The mistakes were a declaration of war against terrorism and the conflation of the threat from al-Qaeda with the threat from Saddam Hussein. The missed opportunities were the opportunities to educate the American public to the realities of terrorism and to the costs of our sole superpower status and the opportunity to mobilize the international community behind us in a transnational campaign against transnational terrorists. (p. 170)

Far from trying to educate the public, U.S. leaders played to their fears…Rather than attempting to put the terrible atrocity of 9/11 into perspective, it fanned the outrage. Rather than countenance the possibility that certain of its actions might have fueled resentment toward it, it divided the world into good and evil, and those who were not with the United States were with the terrorists. (p. 193)

In the concluding chapter “What Is to Be Done?” she sets out “Rules.” Rule 1 is “Have a Defensible and Achievable Goal.”

…had our government declared its goal on the evening of September 11 simply to be to capture those responsible for the attacks, it might very well have been successful. The goal would have required a different political and military strategy in Afghanistan and it would have kept us out of Iraq…The particular brand of terrorism that currently poses a threat to us is terrorism used by Islamic militants; therefore, our goal today should be to stop the spread of Islamic militancy. In order to contain the spread of Islamic militancy, we must isolate the terrorists and inoculate their potential recruits against them. (p. 204)

Other “Rules” are:

“Live by Your Principles.”
“Know Your Enemy”
“Separate the Terrorists from Their Communities”
“Engage Others in Countering Terrorists with You”
“Have Patience and Keep Your Perspective”

In considering U.S. counterterrorist policy since September 11, it is very clear that we have not followed these six rules. We set ourselves an unattainable goal, we have been seen to abandon many of the principles that have guided our democracy, the inadequacies of our intelligence have been exposed, our actions have served to strengthen ties between terrorists and the communities from which they come, we have failed to engage others in the campaign against terrorists, and we have failed to demonstrate either patience or a sense of perspective. (p. 234)

And she is outspoken about our misadventure in Iraq:

Whatever the virtue of the other arguments in favor of the war in Iraq, from the point of view of counterterrorism the invasion of Iraq was a calamitous mistake…the Iraq war, far from being an effective policy against terrorism, immeasurably strengthened the hand of our adversaries and weakened our own. We have alienated the international community and united our enemies against us. We have provided a training ground for our adversaries, spawned a new generation of terrorists convinced that we are at war with Islam, and failed to bring security to the country. The inadequacy of our postwar planning was grossly negligent. We appear never to have taken the time to challenge the assumptions on which we based our policy; instead, we simply assumed that the policy would be effective and never inquired as to the cost. (p. 236)

Ms. Richardson’s ideas for dealing with terrorists—trying to understand why they hate us (“know your enemy”), maintaining our own principles, working with others in the world to defend against terrorism, etc.—make sense if it can be assumed that those who oppose us are rational, people who will not want to harm us if they sense that we are fair and just in all that our government does that affects them. But she seems not to consider that there are times when madmen are at large and can only be dealt with by force--Neville Chamberlain and the world finally saw that with Hitler. It may be that, with all the hateful teaching in the Islamic madrassas and the hatred of the modern world preached to the masses by radical Moslem clerics, we will have to one day conclude that we face an implacable enemy who can only be dealt with by force.

Advice to grandparents

Advice to grandparents (especially grandfathers): Don’t play board or card games with your grandkids. I tried it here in Tustin, California, while visiting our son and his wife and four children, and was ignominiously skunked. We played a card game called “Thirteen”—at which my 17-year-old grandson consistently won, another game called “Junior Scrabble”—which my 7-year-old granddaughter won, and a board game called “Don’t Wake Daddy”—which my 5-year-old-grandson won. To make it a total win for the younger generation, my son consistently beat me at “Scrabble.”

So, to save some shred of my dignity, I decided to ward off any further challenges as follows, “Granddad, do you want to play ___ with me?” “Sweetheart, I would love to, but I hung up my medals a long time ago. Let's wait until you're a little older."

And then, I will hope that they will forget that “…when you’re older” stuff. If they don’t, when they’re older, I’ll say, “I would love to play with you, but my eyesight is really not good enough.”—although it will really be good enough to see a flyspeck on a piece of `paper.

Away from home with children and grandchildren

I am doing this posting from Tustin, California, where my wife and I are visiting our son and his family (wife, Carla, and their four children: Chad, almost 18; Melissa, 7; Zachary, 5, and Olivia, 2).This is our third visit to them. I am reminded of the comment of former Vice President Alben Barkley to the effect that grandchildren are wonderful, because the grandparents can love them, play with them, and then turn them back to their parents.

Tustin, and all of Orange County that I have seen, is modern and spotlessly maintained; there is no peeling paint on buildings, scruffy lawns, street signs of various sizes and shapes, litter, and other signs of neglect that one sees in many East Coast towns and cities.

The automobile is as much of a necessity here as clothing and shelter; driving on the freeways during rush hours is a nightmare.

The mixture of ethnic groups is interesting: aside from apparent Caucasians I see mostly Orientals, followed by Hispanics; I have seen few black people. Visiting our grandchildren’s elementary school is a good place to observe the diversity of people.

The weather is ideal for many people: usually sunny and temperatures in a moderate zone most of the year. But not for me—I learned years ago while living in tropical areas that I missed the four seasons. Although the weather in the Baltimore area, where I have lived for many years, is frequently uncomfortable—the high humidity accentuates the cold in winter and the heat in summer—I very much like its distinct seasons; I especially like some cold winter weather when we can huddle around burning logs in our fireplace.