Substitute for Victory

Every year toward the end of November, it is fashionable to take time off from the job of berating the practitioners of "amateur athletics" in the nation's colleges and make a quick obeisance in the direction of the Harvard-Yale game, where reside values higher than victory. This year, however, even the two invest of the Ivy League schools are knee-deep in re-examination of football, and it would be folly to consider even the Harvard-Yale game apart from all the developments that have occurred since last November.

Since that time, Congress and the national heard that "in war there is no substitute for victory." Though this referred only to real war, it may have set some of the more sensitive aficionados of football to wondering whether their favorite sport had somehow become lodged in the same category. But for the less sensitive, there were the West Point indiscretions, a little tampering with scholastic records at William and Mary, and similar peccadilloes that showed at through at respected institutions of higher learning all over the country.

Probably the most interesting development, though, has been the speeches that college presidents, athletic directions, trustees, and coaches have been moved to make. There have been "realistic" and "idealistic" speeches-demands for calling a spade a spade and calling football a big business, mingles with pious requests that football be taken out of the hands of the big-time operators and given back to the students, as a game.

Harvard and Yale have both made encouraging comments of the idealistic variety the latter having issued several of them in rapid-fire order. And both teams have been encouragingly mediocre-not good enough to excite-the Bowl promoters and invite whispered suspicions, good enough to play an interesting game against even the strongest rivals, and not bad enough to bring even the entire alumni bodies swooping down on the University administrations with demands for blood and victory.

This is the context for today's game. Two relatively idealistic, relatively well-matched teams will meet for the honor which means the most to both of them. The great pity of the occasion is that one of the two must be denied the honor, though we feel sure that the men from Yale will find ample satisfaction in contributing their time and talent to a spectacle rare for its traditional spirit and anomalous for its purely subjective appeal.