PENNSYLVANIA BUILDING FROM NEW FOUNDATIONS

The Pennsylvania football squad has been drilled steadily on shift plays this week in preparation for tomorrow's game. In its past two games against Delaware State and Swarthmore, the Red and Blue players have given their supporters the right to look forward to and unexpectedly successful season. For several years, during the regimes of Bill Hollenback and Bob Folwell as mentors at Penn, there was either disappointment, or, as last year, friction and turmoil connected with the season. Penn powers-that-be, resolving to make a change for the better, have given the Red and Blue football a thorough house-cleaning, causing the exodus of several well-known stars, marked with the scar of professionalism, and the dismissal of Folwell.

It is not fair to Folwell to blame him for the upheaval. Somebody had to be the "goat," and he was tagged "it" in rather shabby fashion. His vindication as a coach lies in the quickness with which the Naval authorities snatched him up to coach the Midshipmen this fall.

Helsman Makes Unostentatious Debut

John Heisman from Georgia Tech, who has replaced him, has begun his work unostentatiously and with a squad that is anything but remarkable. He has not yet resorted to the tricky shifts that were accountable for his "Golden Tornado" teams down South. He saw his team defeat Swarthmore (a team that had scored on Princeton) by clean-cut, direct, "straight" football, 21-0.

At present, the Penn team is halting and unworkmanlike in the operation of the "Heisman shift"; but it is expected the present week's practice will make a difference tomorrow against Lafayette. Since Heisman has been long recognized as the foremost exponent of the modern game, it is not surprising to read that forward passes played a major part in the Penn attack on Swarthmore.

Few Stars in Penn Line-Up

It is an unfamiliar collection of names that he has on his regular line-up. There is no outstanding star end, like Miller, or backs such as Light, or Quigley, of last year's team, no all-around star like Berry, no speedster like Mercer and Minds, stars of recent years. If Heisman can build his attack around Strauss or Whitehill this year, and beat Dobie's Cornellians on Franklin Field late in November, he will be hailed as a wonder-worker by Penn alumni. Strauss will be remembered hereabouts as the man who ran wild against Dartmouth and virtually settled the outcome of the game in one of the set-tos at Fenway Park in 1917.

If Heisman loses this year, as seems improbable now, he will at least have instituted a reliable "system" at Penn, and started a team made up of students, men who make football a secondary interest to college work--decidedly the opposite of last year's aggregation.

Dobie Up to His Old Tricks

Cornell pulled the expected last week in trampling emphatically on St. Bonaventure to the beat of 55-7. It is what one expects from a Dobie-coached eleven, especially after that canny Scot has made it public that he had a squad as green as green apples and one utterly impossible to groom into a winning team. True, St. Bonaventure may have been another of these "mystery teams" that would have its troubles beating one of the Suburban League High School aggregations here, but the fact that Cornell appeared to pack a lightning "express-train" Dobie-like attack gives Ithacans hope that there will be no repetition of last year's farce, when the only hope of score was to get where Shiverick could boot a hasty goal from the field.