Sport: Nifty Fifties

Yale’s Bulldogs ripped through the line like buffaloes. With Hindenlang cutting off tackle, Hart running the ends and Kubie pounding the centre, they piled up three touchdowns in the first half, came back in the second to score another. When the final whistle blew, Yale had swamped Lafayette, 27-to-0, for their fifth victory this season—in the Eastern Lightweight (150-lb.) Football League.

Yale started lightweight football ten years ago, as a sort of Bill of Rights for students who were too light for the varsity. They got some hand-me-down uniforms that had shrunk in cleaning, got Medical Student Herb Miller (who had just hung up his cleats) to teach them some varsity tricks, got Choate, Roxbury and other nearby prep schools to play against them. Then Princeton organized a 150-lb. team. Rutgers, Penn, Lafayette, Villanova followed. The six formed a league,* arranged a round-robin schedule. The late Foster Sanford, onetime Yale footballer and later Rutgers coach, put up a handsome silver trophy—to goto the first college winning the league championship three times.

Last week, as the Yale varsity wound up a disastrous season by losing to Harvard (28-to-0), the Yale lightweights, winning all but one of their games, finished in a tie with Penn for the league championship—Yale’s second leg on the seven-year-old Sanford Trophy. Princeton, with two-and-a-half legs on the cup, finished fifth. Lafayette, undefeated and untied in varsity play this year, failed to win a game.

Basically, 150-lb. football is just like varsity football. Its offensive formations usually run out of a single wing (Yale sometimes uses a double wing). Defensively, the Fifties use all the standard lineups: five, six, seven-man, looping, overshifted lines. But, since all players weigh about the same (no more than 154 Ib. the day of the game), there is a premium on precision, speed, timing. A lightweight eleven’s downfield blocking is often something even the pros might be proud of. Since Fifties play for fun rather than headlines, their strategies are more daring, more spectacular. Not unusual is a series of four laterals on one play.

Though only ten years old, lightweight football already has its Immortals: Yale’s Doug Northrop, who punted 84½ yards during the 1934 game with Penn (longest punt on record until Al Braga of the University of San Francisco punted 89 yards in a varsity game three years ago); Rutgers’ Pomp Chandler, twinkle-toed Negro who led the little Scarlet through three undefeated seasons; Yale’s Dave Boies, who in 1936, before a crowd of 12,000, kicked a last-minute field goal that handed Rutgers its first defeat in four years; Princeton’s Buster Bedford, who scored ten touchdowns during the Tigers’ all-winning 1938 season.

Football’s Fifties have no prescribed training rules, no pre-season practice. Their coaches are usually borrowed from basketball or track. Ken Loeffler, Yale coach for the past five years, was hired originally because of the basketball teams he turned out at Geneva College. His record with Yale basketballers is nothing to boast about, but his Toy Bulldog football teams have lost only six games in five years.

*Later expanded to include Cornell.