Many a man has left the stand after a Harvard-Yale game declaring for the benefit of all those who would stop to listen, "That was not a Yale team," or, "I never saw a Harvard eleven like that before." Just what did he mean? Nine times out of ten, if pressed, he could not tell. What he did mean was that through years of watching the game he gained a number of impressions which in their sum marked Yale or Harvard as a type - as a team type. The absence of one little thing or another - just what he could not say - resulted in his failing to get the same series of impressions and thus the idea of type. For team types do exist, although they are not as clearly marked as they were years ago. Time was when a spectator fairly well up on football could have identified a Harvard, Yale, Princeton or Pennsylvania team almost as far as he could see it, no matter what the colors worn. The same was true, too, in the early days in the West, when Michigan was quite distinct, for instance, from Chicago. But team types and sectional types are slowly passing. The spreading knowledge of the game all over the country and the changes in the rules impose conditions which must frequently be met by the creative students of the game, the coaches, by work along identical lines.

This fact still remains - that two Princeton veterans, even though miles apart, are apt to reason closer together than one Yale and one Princeton veteran, and so on, and in this way team types are perpetuated. But two Princeton veterans will come closer to the conclusions reached by two Yale veterans than would have been the case years ago. As the years draw on I think that, with fairly stable rules, the type differences will draw nearer and nearer the vanishing point without ever quite reaching it. And this is a good thing for the game, for the simple reason that the nearer the game approaches a standard the more chance will there be for the expression of football genius both by coach and player. The "Yale school," the "Harvard school," the "Princeton school," of football are losing their sharp distinctions little by little. So that some years from now the man who says "That did not look like a Yale team," will really mean that it did not look like any standard team. Certain little matters of technique undoubtedly will remain, but it is inevitable in this day of free exchange of coaching opinion and extreme vigilance that the most cherished principles of one "system," when sound, will be adopted into another "system."

Without doubt Yale was the first institution to have a winning "system," and that system long remained a mystery, but year after year coaches went out from New Haven and freely taught what they had learned there. This does not mean the giving away of any "secrets," for there are fewer real secrets in football than the man outside the coaching council imagines, and despite the atmosphere of mystery with which the coaches love to surround themselves there is not a great deal to hide. Given patience, application, and the right kind of brains, and even the most difficult cryptogram may be read. It would be idle to suppose, therefore, that able football men had not been working from the outside on system after system. Some of the secrets have been brought to light in that way. The ultimate system, or standard, will be a composite of all that is good in all systems. This standard will still vary in detail at the various universities.

In the nature of things there will be more variation in the attack than in the defense, for the defense is already pretty close to standard in the East, and gradually approaching that point in the West. The defense varies principally when being specially prepared to meet an eleven unusually well equipped in some one branch of play, as in kicking or forward passing. But nine coaches out of ten, in planning attack, have in mind a standard defense, and build their theory accordingly, which means, in the end, that the theory of attack, not its application to a team specially equipped at certain points, must itself approach a standard. Were a coach dealing with automata of fixed values instead of variable human quantities he would eventually evolve a sort of extremely interesting chess.

I shall not attempt here to say when a Yale team is a Yale team, a Harvard team a Harvard team, etc., but to sketch in the sort of football they have played in the past as it impressed the man in the stands - the sort of football that has led to the idea of team types. In general my idea of Yale is synonymous with power and resource; of Harvard with brilliancy, until recently spasmodic; of Princeton, blinding speed; and of Pennsylvania, variety. All these are reflected in other institutions East and West. Teams such as Dartmouth and Brown do not leave a settled type impression, although the coaching is of the highest class, and the Army and Navy are on advanced theoretical ground but erratic in execution. Carlisle is not a rounded team, as a rule, but the impression one gains of the Indians' play year in and year out is one of extreme variety on attack. Cornell has had occasional teams that approached the modern advanced theory, but I do not think the Ithacans have ever reached the type stage.

In the West there has been less of the type idea, save as one eleven or another reflected Yale or Princeton coaching, with the exception of Michigan, whose eleven has always been the great chance-taker of the football world.

Yale football has always been the football of resource - the football that was always looked to to accomplish the impossible, and frequently did accomplish the improbable. If one plan failed, another succeeded, and there is almost always more in a Yale team in the last five minutes of play than in any other eleven. Yale has built the attack around weight when it was possible to get weight, and the teams have kept their feet better than any others. George Foster Sanford, one of Yale's greatest coaches, has said, "I am the man who put the power behind the ball." It is true of Yale teams of the past, when it was permitted by rule to push and pull the runner, that the power not only has been behind the ball but very often with it. A Yale play had more than one thrust. It swept along like a wave - it gathered momentum, and the farther it went the more powerful it grew. It was an axiom that Yale would always be equipped with a sound defense. The defense has been the pride of the New Haven system for years. In the old days smaller elevens considered it a practical victory could they only score on Yale. Yale has always begun with the defense and ended with the attack. There were times when the attack was so powerful that the defense was never put to the test. But at New Haven a clean goal line has been a fetish. It is true that in recent years it has been impossible to repeat the old records when the season's total ran to something like 500 to 0, but to be scored upon is still looked upon with greater horror at New Haven than anywhere else on the football map.