Tuss

ONLY Princeton stands between the Dartmouth eleven and a successful clean-sweep of the series with the eastern Big Three football powers Harvard, Princeton and Yale. And this afternoon's battle in Palmer Stadium will settle that issue, once and for all.

But regardless of the outcome of today's game, one important question was settled before our team ever left Hanover for the Princeton encounter. And that is that Dartmouth has a good football coach and one of whom we can all be proud.

Every school has its cry-babies, those who look for the scapegoat in an embarrassing situation. Harry Stuhldreher, head coach at the University of Wisconsin, became acutely aware of this condition when, at a recent game, misguided students unfurled banners reading, "Good-bye, Harry" a broad hint to Stuhldreher that, in view of a poor season's record, his tenure as coach at Wisconsin would be abruptly halted. Dartmouth has its share of poor losers, but fortunately they are not as numerous and as brazen as their Wisconsin cousins.

Winning football points the public attention toward the players who score the touchdowns, who make the long runs, who throw the passes and the blocks, and perhaps this is as it should be. But let a team lose four games and that fickle finger of attention turns about and levels itself at the losing football coach.

Sports writers can argue for hours on the relative merits of the T formation as opposed to the single-wing and its related buck-lateral sequences, but football coaches know and we should know that if the material isn't there to begin with, any talk about any system is just so much wasted breath.

With steadily improving material, Coach Tuss McLaughry has guided our football fortunes from a 3-6-0 record in 1946 through a-4-4-1 campaign last season, to a highly successful, if incomplete, 5-2-0 record for this 1948 season. Dartmouth is on the upswing and the wolves have crawled back into their holes.

It is impossible to judge the merits of a football coach on the basis of the season's won and lost record alone. If we take into account the calibre of the manpower on hand, the respect the athletes hold for their coach, and the opinion and respect that the man commands from his brothers in the profession, then we have a criterion with which to judge a coach. With these points in mind, Tuss McLaughry has no peer in the coaching world.

No matter what the score may be today at Princeton, our football team and its coach deserve the biggest of wah-hoo-wahs when they return to Hanover on Sunday.