THE ANNUAL SLUMP.

It is not pleasant to criticise a team which is working hard to represent Harvard creditably, but Saturday's game should serve as a warning to coaches and players alike. A supposedly weaker team carried off practically all the honors in the use of new and open plays, and in several other respects the Harvard team was tried and found wanting. A general condemnation of the eleven would be as unjust as it is unwarranted, but to say that the team as a whole came up to reasonable expectations would be to wander far from the truth. It required the spur of an opponent's touchdown to a waken the team to a fraction of its potential strength, and to bring victory out of defeat. Even then Harvard was twice held for downs within a few feet of the goal line.

After this there will be no easy games to look forward to. Brown, Carlisle and Dartmouth intervene in quick succession before the final and decisive contest, and it is no idle prediction to state that a repetition of yesterday's tactics will mean defeat at the hands of one or more of these strong teams. The mid-season slump is proverbial, and it has certainly appeared. In the coming games the team will have a chance to prove that the slump was only temporary, and if every player enters upon the games with the same fighting spirit which cropped out Saturday toward the end of the second half, Harvard can only be defeated by a better team.