Sport: Midseason Marks

The talented footballers of the U.S. Naval Academy had the bad luck to be selected national champions before they played a single game. It was a burden that even Navy’s powerful line and great backfield could not carry: they bowed twice, on flukes and fumbles, to North Carolina Pre-Flight and to Georgia Tech. Then they came back to wallop Pennsylvania, 26-to-0. Last week at Baltimore, Navy’s big guns poured broadside after broadside into unbeaten Notre Dame. Final score: Navy 32, Notre Dame 13.

Among the 65,000 who packed Baltimore Stadium (capacity 64,015) was Coach Earl Blaik, whose Army team was galloping, 83-to-0, over Villanova at West Point. Blaik might have brought his first two Army teams along as scouting spectators; they were scarcely needed at West Point, where Army mercifully cut the last half of its game from 30 minutes to 16. The unbeaten Cadets meet Notre Dame in New York this week—and Navy three weeks hence, in what will certainly be the payoff game of the 1944 season.

Other Top Teams. The capacity crowd at Baltimore Stadium was typical: just past midseason, a report from 72 colleges showed that 3,237,830 fans had attended games, a 25% increase over last year. Wherever two good teams played last week, the stands were jampacked:

¶ At Columbus, Ohio, 56,380 watched unbeaten Ohio State and its great halfback, 23-year-old dental student Les Horvath, trip Indiana, 21-to-7, and head toward the Big Ten championship.

¶ At Durham, N.C., 34,000 saw Duke knock Georgia Tech from the unbeaten ranks, 19-to-13, with a touchdown pass in the final quarter.

¶ At Philadelphia, a crowd of 48,000 watched once-beaten Michigan put Pennsylvania over a barrel, 41-to-19, with reverses, spinners and lateral forward passes —spun from both T and single-wing formations.

The sharpest rise in attendance (60.2% over last year) has been in the southwest. There a riotous Randolph Field service team led by an ex-All America from Virginia, Lieut. Bill Dudley, has hammered Rice 59-to-0, Texas 42-to-6, Southern Methodist 41-to-0 and two service teams for an average of 45.6 points per game against 1.2 for the opposition. Last week Dudley & Co., with ex-high-school coach Lieut. Frank Tritico directing, swamped the North Texas Aggies, 68-to-0.