Twenty years of football, as player - in an humble-capacity, albeit begun under the best of coaching - spectator on the side line or in the stand, and as a sporting writer, have taught me that of all those who are bound up in the most fascinating of school and college games, the spectators form the class that has suffered the most serious neglect. Football coaches are usually secretive persons, and they have succeeded in bewildering the man in the stand even when failing to outwit the man on the field. It is the spectator who needs the coaching nowadays, and it is in the hope of clearing away for his benefit and that of the uncoached schoolboy much of the mystery that has been deftly thrown around the game by those in close touch with the great football universities that this book is offered to a sometimes puzzled football public.

For any particular system or institution the author holds no brief, for years of careful analysis of the big games have convinced him that no one football system has been able to corner all the gridiron knowledge in the country, and that the gridiron leaders are treading practically the same paths nowadays, and building for the future in the main upon principles that are considered sound by the master minds of football.

There are both strategy and tactics in football as in war - the season is a campaign, the big game a battle. These are the salient features that lift the game out of the ruck of sport to the plane it now occupies. Men of mature years and large business interests still take the time to direct V the playing of this glorified field chess, but they do not take the public into their confidence, and the spectator too often leaves the field without even having faintly begun to understand the groundwork of the great game he has just witnessed.

In the pages that follow the author has endeavored by means of simple diagrams, and explanations shorn as far as possible of technicality, to give alike to the spectator and the younger player, especially the ambitious schoolboy who has not had the advantage of expert coaching either on the blackboard or afield, some Idea of the plays that have been and are successful under the existing rules, and of the generalship that either wins games or loses them with honor. The plays and the use of them tell the story, and if the spectator will apply inductive reasoning to the big games, finding his rule of play from the cases at hand, he will find the fascination of the game more than trebled.

No one knows better than the author the difficulties under which the man in the stand labors, and it is in his interest that the writer has sought to take the game apart in these pages, in order that he may put it together again, which, after all, is the real fun of football.

Credit where credit is due has been given for discovery and progress, remembering always, however, that the game is bigger and broader, more enduring and progressive than the men who teach it and play it.