Bring Back Spring Practice

Each year, the Presidents of the Ivy League colleges take down their 30-30's, adjust their sights, and get set to go Big Game hunting. last February, they bagged a rabbit--a relatively harmless rabbit called Spring football.

A year ago, annihilation of the rabbit was a step towards annihilation of the Leviathan--over commercialized college football. The Ivy Presidents felt that however small a step it was, it moved nevertheless in the right direction.

This January, the Rules Committee of the National Collegiate Athletic Association took a long step forward by Killing off two-platoon football. With the reinstitution of the limited substitution game, however, the resurrection of Spring football becomes essential.

Limited substitution should help equalize competition between big and small colleges. It eliminates to a degree the great source of manpower that helped make West Point the powerhouse of the nation during the war. It once again gives football the status of a game, rather than a mass military engagement. Above all, it ends the era of the specialist--that single-category expert.

But the death of the limited pro must be followed by the rebirth of the well-rounded amateur. Specialists must be replaced by players versed in a variety of a talents --enough talents, at any rate, to enable them to remain on field for the better part of a period. Players in the present-day game have bartered variety for limited perfection. These men--probably the vast majority--need a thorough re-education in the fundamentals of the game.

Last fall, Crimson Coach Lloyd Jordan had three weeks in which to polish up and set into motion a smooth-running squad. But three weeks is hardly enough time for a coach to produce the versatile player now required. Spring practice in such a case becomes a necessity--not because a team must be drilled and re-drilled until it reaches near-professional calibre, but because the players on that team must learn again those practices which allow him to play for thirty or forty minutes without loss of limb.

Practice Is Not Re-emphasis

The factor of conditioning is not inconsiderable. While some men will be eclipsed by the new ruling, others will find Fall Saturday afternoons much more rigorous. It is obvious that full-time performance requires a great deal more endurance than does a ten-minute stint.

Spring practice would serve a further goal than re-education and conditioning: it would equalize competition with teams like Ohio University, Colgate, and Davidson that have had the advantage of the extra sessions.

Support of Spring football, however, must not be construed as a recommendation for re-emphasis of the sport. Spring football is neither the root of commercialism nor one of its off-shoots. It is simply a period during which a coach may ground his players in the essentials of a gruclling and often dangerous sport. Indeed, Spring football was born a long time before the game became polluted. If the evil is to be eliminated, it must be eliminated by purging its roots: the almost universal and thoroughly rotten recruiting policies of our nation's colleges.

CRIMSON editorial policy is decided by a majority vote of the editors at weekly policy meetings. Although the Editorial Board assigns one editor to write each statement of policy, the views expressed are those of the newspaper as a whole.