The Midland Journal

By New York Post.—WNU Service,

Public Paying Off
on Accomplishments
in Gridiron World

YEARS ago when Democrats and Republicans were still doing business as such, life was considerably easier for a sports writer. Everything had a tag on it, was classified with seemingly as much permanence as the two major political parties.

There were only two big leagues, the American and the National. No one had thought at that time to identify the Yankees as a separate organization any more than they had yet conjured up such cute labels as curve-ball league, fast-ball league, hitters' league and pitchers' league.

Situation Is Changed
by Irish and Pitt

Only football had anticipated the modern trend. There was, for instance, the matter of properly assorting the coaches. Once that had been easy. You merely put them into two groups, "lucky fellows with jobs in the Ivy league" and "sad agents hoping there would come a day when they would have a pay roll big enough for them to compete with the Ivy league in the higher educational field."

Then the classification changed. Notre Dame and Pittsburgh, two institutions which for years had been doing well enough in preparing young men for the travails of teaching and bond selling, enlarged their scope.

Forthwith the spotlight centered on the two men of undoubted genius who had been responsible for this pickup. With the generosity that is proverbial among newspaper men, the press credited each of them with having a system. Other coaches copied their strategy. Soon it became the habit to refer even to such long-established practitioners as Gil Dobie or Hurryup Yost as followers of the "Warner system" or the "Rockne system."

Obviously there was some error here and there in such groupings, but the general rating was pretty well accepted. One day I asked Rockne if he believed there was any sense in such regimentation.

"No," he replied.

"There's only one way to classify coaches or teams either, for that matter. Winners or losers. That's what it all boils down to."

Midway in another football season and knee-deep in gentlemen who are claiming all sorts of new classifications as the result of municipal and state elections throughout the nation, I have been thinking about that reply.

Both Sides End Up
by Blaming Teams

I am not entirely satisfied with "Pollyannas" and the "Pity Poor Us" groupings. Actually there is very little difference between the Pollyannas claiming the nicest things are going to happen in this best of all possible worlds and the Pity Poor Us-es whining in advance.

Both sets usually wind up by blaming it all on the team Saturday night. Meanwhile, since opposing coaches and the operators of football pools are cynical men, they have fooled nobody save people who play football pools.

It also returns us to where we started. Perhaps because, like other voices of the people, alumni usually do their darndest in November, I could try the rating once suggested by the lamented sports commentator, Bill McGeehan. This was,

"Coaches sure of their jobs and coaches who never say a word even when the music prof flunks the only running halfback left with two legs."

Yet, what good does that do us? Almost immediately we discover that some of the men sure of their jobs are so new to success that they have not yet had real opportunity to make a failure of it. Conversely, some of the boys who have lost everything save the franchise, took their nose dive because they were too smug while at the top.

That brings us back to the Rockne rating—"Winners and losers." True, men who compose the groups often interchange so quickly that it is difficult to tell who is coming and who is going. Yet, with all other things equal there are men who will fumble and men who will go on for touchdowns. The essential difference is there in all sports. Sometimes form holds for a day, sometimes for a season. Anyhow, the public pays off

And, come to think of it, aren't sports like that greater?