Football

"If we are beaten it will be only because we lost to one of the finest teams on the gridiron," intoned Coach Herbert O. ("Fritz") Crisler, who out of football clothes might be mistaken for a high-powered preacher. "But there are 13 seniors going out on the field for Princeton, and I have an idea that they don't intend to lose."

The game the 13 Princeton seniors did not intend to lose was with Dartmouth last week, a contest which filled all 56,000 seats in Princeton's Palmer Stadium for the first time since the 1928 Yale game. It settled, at least to the satisfaction of most sportswriters, the mythical Eastern football "championship." Hence the amount of preliminary analysis, both amateur and professional, was terrific. Clerks and columnists noted that while neither team had been defeated, Dartmouth had had only one formidable opponent (Yale), while Princeton had had two (Pennsylvania, Navy). Princeton had lost only one game in three years; Dartmouth had just exploded its Yale jinx and was the country's highest scoring team (289 points).

To both teams' disadvantage, the East's first storm of the winter dumped two inches of wet snow into the field as Princeton kicked off. Followed an exchange of punts, a fumble by each team, and then Dartmouth popped out the old "Statue of Liberty" play and Frank Nairne went 24 yd. around right end to the Princeton 1-yd. line. Hefty John Handrahan put the ball over for a touchdown, was disappointed when Brother Joe Handrahan missed the kick. There ended Dartmouth's scoring for the day.

Nothing, apparently, could stop the Princetonians after they came out of their customary first-quarter doze to find themselves a touchdown behind. In heroic marches, Paul Pauk, Jack White, Chick Kaufman and Garry LeVan spent the rest of a nasty afternoon running up one of Princeton's largest scores against Dartmouth. Each man got a touchdown. In addition LeVan, one of the 13 seniors playing for the last time in Palmer Stadium, got his nose smashed so badly that he had to be carried off the field. The roar that went up at his exit came at a significant moment in Princeton's latter-day football history.

In 1932 Garrett Benjamin LeVan Jr. of Steubenville, Ohio played his first year of college football and Fritz Crisler went East from Minnesota to make his debut as Princeton's first non-alumnus coach. LeVan's rocket-like rushes and nimble defense work made him the first publicized star of the Crisler football renaissance at Princeton. When LeVan & classmates graduate next June, Coach Crisler will have run through his first football generation at Princeton. Having messed up a Dartmouth pass and made a touchdown, Garry LeVan went to the showers last week without having disappointed Princeton's football followers in three years.

With Dartmouth humbled 26-to-6, with excellent chances of making up for last year's deplorable performance against Yale this week, Coach Crisler was caught in a mellow mood by reporters after the game. "I knew they would win,'' smiled he, adding mystically: "Before the game started the seniors on the squad came up to me and gave me a silent pledge that I knew would lead to victory."

Many a Princetonian believes that his university, which practically invented the game of U. S. football, was playing it when wild animals roamed many a present-day Western campus. But it remained for the University of Minnesota to take the game out of the class of sport, make it something like a science. Executing their plays in much the same manner and spirit as the professional Green Bay Packers, the Minnesotans last week rolled up a 33-to-7 score over Wisconsin for their 17th straight victory.

The Christmasy red and green team of Washington University (St. Louis) triumphed over Oklahoma A. & M. 39-to-13, putting Washington in a tie for the Missouri Valley Conference Championship with Tulsa University, which simultaneously beat Drake 7-to-0.

Yale slopped through a cold rain to win from Harvard 14-to-7, thus settling the championship of major teams on the New York, New Haven & Hartford R. R., since each had trounced Brown.

Fumbles, blocked kicks, wild passes, three men laid out and one carried off the field on a stretcher raised the hair of 50,000 spectators at South Bend, Ind. as the greatest Notre Dame team since the Rockne era came from behind once more to close its season with a 20-to-13 triumph over the University of Southern California.

The Horned Frogs of Texas Christian repelled the Rice Owls 27-to-6. Same day the Sky Raiders of Southern Methodist descended disastrously on Baylor's Bears 10-to-0. This week the undefeated Frogs and Raiders meet at Fort Worth for a titanic battle. No matter which wins, Texans predicted the Lone Star State will be represented in the Rose Bowl.

Nine other teams had failed to break California's stout line, but Stanford's Fullback Bobby Grayson led his teammates through it twice, upsetting the unbeaten Golden Bears 13-to-0 and winning the honor of representing the West in the Rose Bowl.

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