Green Jottings

Intercollegiate athletic news this past month centered generally around the National Collegiate Athletic Association meetings in Washington and St. Petersburg, and items of interest to Dartmouth alumni came out of both these meetings. At the Washington meetings, William H. McCarter '19, director of athletics at Dartmouth, was nominated for the presidency of the NCAA. For many years Bill has played an important role in the NCAA and has served at one time or another on virtually every major committee of that group. However, in the final vote he lost the election by a narrow 81-72 margin to A. B. Moore, faculty chairman of athletics at the University of Alabama. Bill, however, remains a member of the nine-man executive board of the NCAA.

But the news which attracted the most attention was the NCAA's Rules Committee decision abolishing the two-platoon system of football. The new rule, which becomes effective next fall, states that a player withdrawn in the first or third periods of the game cannot return to the game during those periods. Players withdrawn during the second and fourth quarters of play before the final four minutes of the period, may go back into the game during the final four minutes.

As a member of the powerful NCAA Rules Committee and as secretary-treasurer of the American Football Coaches' Association, Dartmouth's Tuss McLaughry probably had as much to do with putting the new substitution rule through as anyone in the NCAA. A long-time advocate of one-platoon football and justly famous for his "eleven iron men" team at Brown, Tuss had this to say about the matter: "The basic philosophy of the two-platoon system has been all wrong. It's like having a team of hitters and a team of fielders in baseball. Now we'll go back and play the game of football like it was played for 75 years and the way it ought to be played. Coaches will have to adjust. They can't follow the line of least resistance any more. They'll have to get busy and develop boys who can play both ways."