Inexperienced Dartmouth Football Team Looks to Coach Blaik for Chances of Holding Their Own in Major Encounters

The following article was written by a Dartmouth correspondent after the Bates game. The progress of the team may be followed in another article to appear this week.

Green is the word for Dartmouth.

When eleven varsity men are taken away from a football team in one year the result is that the next team will be plagued by inexperience, and that is exactly what has happened at Dartmouth.

The wholesale exodus of varsity men took away from Coach Earl Blaik the result of his first three years as head coach of the Big Green and at the same time marked the exit of the most powerful Indian eleven since the days of Swede Oberlander.

Such outstanding men as Carl "Mutt" Ray, a fixture at center for the last three seasons, Johnny Handrahan and Dave Camerer, All-Eastern choices for fullback and tackle respectively, and other mainstays of the Dartmouth eleven that went through the 1936 season with but one defeat and one tie in as difficult a schedule as has been faced by any Indian team to date were taken away via the graduation route.

Bob McLeod, fleet-footed right half back, Captain Merrill Davis, tall and rangy right-end, and versatile Fred Hollingworth, who has been shifted from left half to quarterback this year, are the three remaining regulars who will form the nucleus of the 1937 squad.

Although only one game has been played to date it is evident that while the team has potentialities, they are still undeveloped. Bill Hutchinson, last year's freshman star, Colby Howe, a newcomer who looked well in spring practice, Larry Hull, a regular end two years ago who has not seen action since then because of scholastic probation, Bob Gibson, Ray's understudy for the past two seasons, all looked well in pre-season serimmagen and in the Bates game, but the stellar blocking and the ability to work as a unit and not as just eleven individual players that was a feature of the 1936 gridmon's play is not evident in the Green team.

In the first game Dartmouth's 39-0 victory was not really as gratifying to the coaches as the score might seem to indicate. Three of the touchdowns were scored on long runs in which individual brilliance not team work played an important role. Two of the runs were made by McLeod, one for 83 yards and the other for 78, and the third by Bill Hutchinson who intercepted a Bates pass and scampered 63 yards for a touchdown. But the team did not function properly as a unit and was unable to make even two consecutive first downs against the very inediocre Bobcat gridmen.

And it is this lack of unity and coordination that Blaik's Green team will have to overcome before they can even hope to meet with success in the major games to come.