FOOTBALL FOIBLES

The move of the University of Illinois football eleven in voting against the election of a captain for 1930 on the theory that an athletic leader does not turn in his best game when he has the added care of a captaincy should not be hailed as such a progressive and significant step as metropolitan accounts would lead us to believe.

For more than a score of years coaches of certain midwestern universities have rotated the position of captain throughout the squad in the course of a season, picking a different leader before each game. Others, notably St. Louis University, have done away with the captain altogether until the banquet which climaxed the fall campaign, then honoring that man as captain whose services during the season had been deemed the greatest.

The chief significance of this recent move seems to be as an outgrowth of the pervasive professionalistic tendency, particularly strong in the middle west, toward the increasing power of the coach's position. In the hands of the coach, even an elected captain can often be hardly more than a puppet. The natural outgrowth seems to be in many cases the unnatural appointment of a captain before each game in the same spirit that the coach selects plays against his various opponents.

Although the validity of the statement that a captain cannot give his best is purely a matter of opinion, it at least demonstrates the anomalous and merely honorary position of the captaincy in modern football. This is neither the first nor the greatest bolt of thunder that has come out of the West.