A MENACE TO FOOTBALL

The extreme to which football as a commercial spectacle can be carried was demonstrated yesterday by an announcement from the athletic committee of the Philadelphia sesquicentennial celebration to the effect that the committee is planning what will amount to a national football tournament for early December, 1926. These plans conflict directly with a newer tendency of undergraduate opinion in some of the larger Eastern universities, which, while maintaining football in its proper place as a college sport, would oppose the menace of commercialism. Some enthusiastic and short-sighted people, forgetful of or callous to the future of football in American colleges, would prostitute it now to provide an athletic head-liner for the amusement of the multitude at Philadelphia's celebration.

So far as their prospects go, the committee may congratulate themselves on their project. The four greatest football teams in America meeting for three inter-sectional games for the first real national championship would be a spectacle equaled in magnitude only by such commercial affairs as the world's series or a heavyweight championship bout. And, from the point of view of the one hundred and twenty thousand spectators, this plan would result in some magnificent football. The committee has secured the endorsement of such demigods of the game as Knute Rockne, Alonzo Stagg and Andy Smith. The prestige of these men, aided by that, of the sesquicentennial itself will probably carry the plan through.

It is also quite probable that public enthusiasm over the magnitude of this project will result in such a national championship tournament becoming an annual event; and, in view of this probability, it will be interesting to see what course the so-called "Big Three" will follow. Participation in such a contest, involving as it does both greater national interest than over before, and the hysterical atmosphere of a tremendous crowd, undoubtedly runs counter to the more reasonable and less puerile attitude toward football which those who have the well-being of football as a college sport closest at heart are striving to foster. In becoming the greatest spectacle in American life, football has concerned itself too much with the interest of the spectators. Colossal stadiums have been build, rotogravure sections filled with pictures of individual players. The "Big Three", as they are termed, constituted the cradle of intercollegiate football. If, in this emergency, they choose, in the interests of the colleges themselves, to lead the way back to sanity, they may save the future of intercollegiate football in America.