Show or Substance?

It's really nice to hear football coaches, college presidents, and athletic directors all over the country loudly thumping their chests and singing the praises of football de-emphasis in a high falsetto voice. It's even nicer when they do something constructive about it. But it's awfully hard to evaluate a move like Yale's abolition of spring practice, which its sponsors say is a great symbol of de-emphasis, but which seems to bear little relation to the factors underlying the current scandalous football situation.

Spring practice could, by stretching a point, be called a manifestation of the hysterica! desire for victory that characterizes much alumni pressure. But other sports, which have not gone "big-time," also have out-of-season practice. The crew sweeps the Charles all fall and plugs away in the tanks during the winter. And the basketball, hockey, and baseball teams all open their practice a good time before the regular season begins. Spring football practice, if it is not made so grueling as to interfere with a student's work or does not become an absolute prerequisite for participation in the fall, is no different from a spring sport in its general effect. In fact, because of its shorter duration, it probably has less effect on spring study habits than baseball or crew, for instance.

From the viewpoint of de-emphasis of football, spring practice can be attacked or defended. It can be attacked for giving too much importance to football by making it into an all-year activity, for penalizing men who only want to go out for football as a two-month game. But it can be defended as a way of giving coaches more time to build a competent football team without having to buy all-star high school players, and the latter argument seems at least as cogent as the former ones.

All things considered, it is hard to see why Yale chose this particular aspect of football to make its big show of de-emphasis, and why it bursts its announcement onto the field without the sort of co-ordination that marked the recent Harvard-Yale-Princeton statement of policy on admissions and scholarships. Whether the statement is the result of guilt-feelings about some recruiting program being developed at New Haven (a "smoke screen," to use Lloyd Jordan's term) or a manifestation of a sincere desire to de-emphasize football is an open question right now.

There is quite enough subterfuge in college athletics and more than enough discrepancies between stated and actual policies to make any extra obfuscation undesirable. Until Yale makes clear just what it hopes to achieve by abolishing spring practice, it will be impossible to say whether this new step is an advance toward the ideal of strictly amateur athletics or not.