Yovicsin Wants Return Of Easier Substitution

John Yovicsin, Harvard's football coach, hopes that college football will return to the free substitution rule next year.

"I think it would help Ivy League football especially," Yovicsin said yesterday. "Practice sessions could be shorter--you could get more practice in an hour and 15 minutes of practicing a specialty than in and hour and 45 minutes of practicing two ways.

"There would be fewer injuries because the boys would know their jobs better. You'd have more boys playing. And you would get rid of this senseless business of teams taking deliberate penalties in order to stop the clock."

Under this year's substitution rule, two substitutes were allowed into the game when the clock was running. When time was out, substitutions were unlimited. Proponents of platoon football resorted to deliberate penalties, deliberately incomplete passes, punts out of bounds and other desperate measures to get their specialists into the ball game.

Harvard and Yale almost alone among Ivy teams did not platoon. "I'm glad now that we didn't," Yovicsin said. "I think we beat some teams that we might not have if we had platooned. We thought at the beginning of practice that we would platoon eventually, but that we didn't know our personnel well enough to start right away and tell 50 boys to play offense and 50 defense.

"So we put it off a week, and the next week there were some injuries, and the next week something else. We considered platooning every week, even after the season started, but we just decided it wasn't worth it."

Yovicsin recommended a return to free substitution in the annual report each head coach makes to the American Football Coaches Association. He also recommended returning the goal post to the goal line in order to encourage field-goal kicking.

For the last three years a large majority of the coaches has recommended a return to free substitution, but the Rules Committee of the National Collegiate Athletic Association has settled for some kind of a compromise.

"I think they'll take some kind of step towards free substitution this year," Yovicsin said. "If they don't approve it altogether, they might stop the clock when the ball changes hands. If they do that, of course, free substitution is back. But I'm not even sure about that--they've been very unpredictable in the past."

Yovicsin said that the early signing of college football players to professional contracts would be the chief topic when the Football Coaches Association meets in Chicago next Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.

"The college administrators, the deans and athletics directors, are going to have to do something about this," Yovicsin said. "I don't like this business of signing contracts while you're still playing in college, and I don't like this business of rushing over to the sidelines after a bowl game and signing up, either. A boy can play pro football if he wants to, but he ought to keep these business deals separate from college athletics."

Yovicsin said he thought professionals wanted to stop the frantic bidding for college players, too. "They need good relations with colleges. This is where their players come from and their coaches, too. College coaches do a lot of work for professional teams; even in the Ivy League they send us forms asking for specific information on a boy or asking if we have any prospects. On a team like Alabama, for instance, that would amount to a lot of work.

"This might be a place where the NCAA could bring the two pro leagues together--they don't seem to be able to do it themselves," he said.