AFTER HARVARD, WHAT?

Solemn and scholarly, Harvard's Faculty Committee on Athletic Sports convened in Cambridge to consider the portentous fact that in six years under Head Coach Lloyd Jordan, 56, the Crimson football team has won only 24 games while losing 31 and tying three. Few men in the room knew a crossbuck from an Eliot House chambermaid. Only Associate Dean Robert Blake Watson had had direct contact with the game (as a scrub on the 1936 squad which won 3, lost four). The rest of the committee included four Ph.D.s (a Russian-born chemist plus professors of Greek literature, economics and medieval history.) There were also some assorted deans, a professor of hygiene, and a director of financial aid. But like all Monday-morning quarterbacks, the committeemen wound up by blaming everything on the white-thatched, mild-mannered coach Jordan, they recommended to the Harvard Corporation last week, should be fired for "poor teaching."

Wondering why he had ever quit Amherst, where 18 years of service had brought him comfort and the athletic director's job, Jordan did not bother to point out that during his years on "the Square" his "classroom" had been ruthlessly depleted by both academic and physical casualties. He accepted his sentence stoically and went home to ponder an awesome question: After Harvard, where can a football coach go?