THE PRESS

(Ed. Note--The following article is a letter written to the New York Times.)

My attention has been drawn to a recent editorial in The Times in which you seem to adopt a slightly cynical attitude toward comments made in my annual report for 1927-28 on withdrawing coaches from the direct supervision of intercollegiate games. The subject is not a new one and perhaps does not require any detailed discussion at just this moment. I venture, however, to remark upon one of two considerations which affect the whole matter.

The problem is chiefly, confined to baseball and football. In the case of baseball there is, so far as I am aware, no legitimate ground on which can be defended, in the interest of the game itself, the practice of permitting the coaches to direct the play. In the case of football the problem is a little more difficult, because there is involved the question of withdrawing men who have been more or less injured in play and the substitution of others for them. This situation is thought, with a good deal of justice, to call at times for judgment more objective and intelligent than the players themselves under the excitement of the moment are always able to command. To turn the supervision of this matter over to medical officers is to invite the suspicion that they are merely carrying out a coach's instructions. Nevertheless, I am sure that any one of several possible procedures would care for this case satisfactorily.

The two great obstacles to be overcome, however, are not incident to the game itself at all. The first has to do with the difficulty of securing a general agreement among the institutions which compete with one another. No one college is likely to be willing to withdraw the supervision of the coach unless its chief competitors follow the same practice. For example, some of Yale's opponents have been willing to adopt this policy but others have not. Only once therefore, so far as I am aware, has Yale actually tried the method.

How long it will take to master these two obstacles to giving back to the players the real supervision of the games I cannot predict, but I have no question at all that the change will occur. There has for a long time been at Yale a large body of opinion strongly favorable to this procedure and Mr. T. A. D. Jones, who was for many years the coach of the Yale football teams, is now writing a series of articles for one of the metropolitan papers in which he is discussing sympathetically this program.