FOOTBALL: TODAY AND TOMORROW By William W. Roper. Duffield and Co., New York, 1927. $2.50

WILLIAM W. Roper needs no introduction to Harvard readers. As coach of the Princeton football team, he has written a book that will make interesting reading for a couple of hours. "Football: Today and Tomorrow" is primarily for the football student and yet it will interest the ordinary spectator who wonders how a football machine is built. Vividly and simply. Roper writes of the most important phases of football life, gives sounder advice to coaches of football teams, and intermingles his advice and diagnosis with many anecdotes which are bound to attract the average reader. The book is evidently written to justify "non-scouting" agreements and to show how real "football spirit" can be instilled into eleven men who would "die for dear old Princeton."

To the "small college" coach this book will be of real value in that it gives him the benefit of the experience of a coach who has been identified with professional college coaching since 1906 and it will probably aid in destroying many of the former ideas of quarterback-play, of training, and of psychologizing. For the average "big-team" coach the book merely gives a system that has worked at Princeton and may work somewhere else.

The book is not indispensable to the onlooker but he will gain much by reading it if he wants to know how a team is really molded into shape, and it will amuse one for an evening as do all books that tell the story of football heroes and of "never-to-be-frogotten" games and plays.

In his appeal to put "fight talks" and psychologizing on the shelf he is basically sound but one has the feeling that Mr. Roper had his tongue in his cheek in writing this chapter.

And even Harvard, P.D. Haughton, and Charlie Buell come in for some mention.

But seriously, it is a book that will please the football coach, player, and rabid spectator, because it is written so that anybody can enjoy it.