Taps

With one minute to play, Navy's supposedly small-bore football team was three yards from one of the great upsets in football history. There were scrambled emotions among civilians in the crowd of 102,000 in Philadelphia's Municipal Stadium. They first made the underdog Middies their sentimental favorites--but in the last few seconds few seemed to want the Army's great Davis, Blanchard & Co. to lose. In the last few ticks, Navy fullback Lynn Chewning smacked center and bounced back one yard. With the seconds dissolving, a Navy rooter yelled, "Take time out!.Kill the clock!" It was too late; the game ended with Navy on Army's 4-yard line. The score: Army 21, Navy 18.

So the curtain was rung down on a happy ending for one of the greatest teams in history--in three years it had won 27 games, lost none, been tied only once. In that last game drawling Doc Blanchard, weighing the same 205 Ibs. he did two years ago, had broken loose for 53 yards and a touchdown. Shifty Glenn Davis had gone around end for another, heaved a pass to Doc for Army's third score.

Next fall, eight of Army's graduating first-stringers, including Blanchard & Davis, expect to be second lieutenants at Fort Riley, Kans.--and to play on the post football team. Moaned Army's backfield coach, Civilian Andy Gustafson: "The coaches wish they were going along, too." --

Football's first postwar season ended last week with a few whimpers. Young

Ed McKeever, after winning more than he lost, quit as boss of Cornell football; destination unknown. Two shrewd oldsters--Texas' Dana Bible, 55, and Colgate's Andy Kerr, 68--stepped aside for younger men. The College of the Pacific not too tactfully said aloud that maybe the granddaddy of all coaches, 84-year-old Amos Alonzo Stagg, should quit.

At the University of Wisconsin, up-in-arms students suggested that Coach Harry Stuhldreher, one of Notre Dame's Four Horsemen, should be put to pasture. Students at the University of California, including 42 members of the squad (which won two and lost seven) squawked about Coach Frank Wickhorst and his assistants, heard a squad spokesman say shamelessly that "something should be done to help the athlete in a monetary way."

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