Odell Brings Blue to Best Season in Years

He's an old Blue Bulldog and he's been biting at Johnnie Harvard's heels for nigh onto 60 years now, but there won't be a trace of senility in the Eli hound's growl when he rushes onto his home greensward to grapple with the Crimson this Saturday in the sixty-first clash of the ivied classic, which started in the same year that the "new dining-club at Memorial Hall" served its first lamb and mint jelly.

In the long-ago fall of 1874, when an editorial in the "Magenta," the original CRIMSON, challenged reticent Yale footballers to a battle on the gridiron, it was urged that "Yale may refuse on the score that Harvard has already become well acquainted with the game. Very true, but Yale can practise and learn it during the fall. It is a game very simple to learn, requiring, at the utmost, two week's practice for a club to be able to play it skillfully."

Elis Take More Time

Yale has practiced it and learned it well this fall. It has taken first-year coach Howie Odell more than the two weeks that the John Kieran of '74 recommended, but it can't be denied that the Eli club of '42 plays it skillfully.

A few weeks ago there were many followers of Crimson football who, in the dark days before Comeford-to-Lyle, envisioned an oft-beaten Bulldog as the late November antidote for the early season blues. But Yale has taken full advantage of the masterpiece of confusion in the Eastern football picture, and it will be anything but an underdog Bulldog that will attempt to gain the first Yale victory over Harvard since 1939.

Beat Princeton, Brown

From the uncoordinated also-rans that took it on the chin from Penn to monsters to the tune of 35 to 6, Harlow-tutored Odell has wrought a well balanced unit which comes into Saturday's climax game with victories over Princeton and Brown.

There won't be anybody filling the mammoth shoes of Clint Frank and Larry Kelley when the product of Odell's first year effort trots into the Bowl. Individual stars are not an essential ingredient in the Odell formula, nor is any November circus stuff to be expected from this Eli mentor who is an avowed fundamentalist.