THE FOOTBALL SEASON

At the risk of seeming further to over-emphasize athletics, one may append a brief comment on the football season as thus far developed—at the moment of writing there remains one game to play—including a word as to the lamentable episode which deprived the Dartmouth team of the services of Alton Marsters in the closing games of the season. The deprivation wrought by the injury to Marsters was most serious; and yet, great as was the loss sustained in the removal of so outstanding a player, it sufficed to reveal that there was still an abundance of talent to offset and disprove the not infrequent allegation that Dartmouth was too largely "a one-man team." Very probably the college has never had a more competent player than this phenomenal quarter-back with his unusual adroitness in three different activities at once, or a director of plays who was more resourceful in devising both attack and defense. Many sporting writers have indicated their unhesitating preference for Marsters as the All- American quarter, and the choice seems well deserved. But it should be added that, even after the blow to Dartmouth's football hopes sustained in the injury to this great player's back in the closing minutes of the Yale game, the team was able to come back strongly to defeat Brown and Cornell. This year has at least given to football history some unusually outstanding figures, such as Booth of Yale and Marsters of Dartmouth, in the eastern colleges, whose prowess may well become legendary and set a mark for future players to aspire to reach. Incidentally it has taught us the desirability of developing supernumerary talent for the always present possibility that accident may deprive us of one superlatively useful man.

It has been a more successful season by far than the last, and the inability (largely through adverse fate) to defeat Yale is at the present writing the only fly in the ointment—although by the time these lines are printed the score to be made against the Navy will be engraved irrevocably on the pages of sporting history. Great credit for an honorable and fruitful season must go, not only to the players and their leaders, but also to head-coach Jackson Cannell who had the difficult task of following the redoubtable Jess Hawley as skipperin-chief.