Sport: College Try

On U. S. football fields last week the good old college try resulted in many a dizzy, topsy-turvy game:

>In the Yale Bowl, Fritz Crisler’s Michigan team, which had lost toMinnesota in the last five minutesof play the week before, turned the tables by snatching the game from Ducky Pond’s surprisingly scrappy Yale eleven five minutes before the final gun. Thus, with a 15-10-13 victory Michigan avenged the trouncing Yale handed her the last time they met—in 1883.*

>On Franklin Field, before 60,000 spectators, young George Munger’s young Penn team, fighting desperately to regain the prestige it lost when Princeton smudged its clean slate fortnight ago, staged a thrilling one-point victory over Columbia, 14-10-13. Halfback Sid Luckman, who gained 177 yards for Columbia with his forward passes, lost the game when one of his kicks for extra point went wide.

>At Baton Rouge, Louisiana State and Vanderbilt, two of the South’s strongest powerhouses, held one another scoreless until almost the last minute. Then the home team suddenly set off fireworks. Result: Vanderbilt’s first defeat of the season, 7-to-0.

>At Milwaukee, undefeated Texas Christian, led by amazing young Davey O’Brien, muddled Marquette with the most spectacular air maneuvers of the week. Quarterback O’Brien completed seven passes in a row that paved the way for two touchdowns before retiring to the sidelines at the end of the first quarter. Returning in the last quarter, he threw another pass that scored a third touchdown. He kicked three extra points. Score: Texas Christian 21, Marquette 0.

>In Temple Stadium at Philadelphia perhaps the dizziest game of all was staged between 67-year-old Pop Warner’s Temple boys and 59-year-old Gil Dobie’s Boston College boys. Trailing 19-to-26 with less than three minutes to play, Temple zoomed from one end zone to the other in just three plays (a 50-yard runback of a kickoff, an incompleted pass, and then a completed pass), booted the extra point, tied unbeaten Boston College 26-10-26. Each team scored four touchdowns, succeeded in two of its tries for the extra point, kicked wide once, and had one try blocked.

*According to Michigan records, the score was 46-to-0; according to Yalerecords, it was 64-to-0.