Football Matches

The inexhaustible propensity of U. S. people to sit and look on was heavily exploited last Saturday. Millions of football folk sat on narrow benches under the tingling October wind, hardening themselves for the real tests of November. Fur coats were given their earliest workouts, wind-defying cosmetics were tested, feet tapped tentatively on chill concrete against the afternoons when they will be all but frozen. Six hundred thousand by authentic estimate crammed themselves around the 15 leading games --Notre Dame-Navy, Penn-Penn State, and Stanford-Southern California assembling 60,000 each.

The week before, a busy little Bucknell team had trounced Penn State; Penn had melted the famed "Iron Men"* from brown. There could be little doubt of a victory for Penn, which was odd because Hake, Monk, Olexy, the Brothers Scull, Wascolonis, etc. of Penn were worthless before Delph, Pannaccion, Roepke, Hamas, etc. of Penn State. Score 20-0.

At Baltimore, Navy squirmed to defeat for the first time since 1925. Squirming more efficiently, Notre Dame won the game, 19-6. Flannagan & Niemic squirmed fastest for Notre Dame, although Niemic, anemic, fumbled a punt in the first quarter, giving Navy their single score.

Midwestern gridirons trembled as strong teams galloped to & fro. Northwestern's to & fro went farther than Ohio State's; score 19-13. Wisconsin could go neither to nor fro against Michigan, losing 14-0. Minnesota and Indiana matched to for to and fro for fro, tying 14-14. True also for Iowa State and Illinois; 12-12. Against Purdue a toe helped Chicago to turn a tie into a trimming.

Harvard, Yale and Princeton hammered, yawed and pounced to victories over Holy Cross, Brown and Washington & Lee. Harvard hurried through holes in Holy Cross to win 14-6; Washington & Lee hesitated and let Princeton sneak twice between them, 13-0. Yale facing Brown with nine six-footers, was out of reach, 19-0.

St. Xavier in the West, faced eleven men from Lee; refused to be argued with or interfered with or tackled; rolled up the hugest score of the season, 132-0.

Duke (tobacco-stained Trinity) trounced Richmond, 72-0. . . . Wofford offered no defence to Chattanooga, losing 7 to 38. ... Georgia Tech climbed through Alabama, 13-0.

Southern California took a live pig to Palo Alto. The pig has been blessed by Cinemactress Marion Davies, and presented to Captain Drury of Southern California as a mascot. Drury played a small part in Miss Davies' latest cinema The Fair Coed. He played a large part in California's clash with Stanford; plunging 41 times for an average of 4 yards per plunge. California scored 13. Badly outplayed, Stanford gave Fleish-hacker the ball for seven successive hacks; stole a touchdown in the dying seconds of the last period; tied the game. The pig pouted.

*So called because the Brown eleven of 1926 played through its important games without using substitutes. TIME, October 54, 1957