It is only in recent years that the Western defense has come to approach the range of the Eastern defense, whereas Yost, the Michigan coach, has been far in advance of any Eastern coach in the planning of the forward pass. Again, few Eastern elevens have been able to maintain the pace set by Yost with certain of his "Hurry up " elevens, especially when he had Martin Heston behind the line. Heston has been called by good authorities the fastest man for fifteen yards in the country. Yost's attack was built around this man, who ran from the position of right or left halfback with equal facility, and the Michigan teams of those days were made up of giants. At Chicago, Stagg, another Easterner, and a Yale man, went in for the open game with a vengeance, and he in common with other coaches of the West, even though originally Easterners, has always foughtfor thereten-tion of the forward pass. In individual technique the coaching of Western line men has always been behind that in the East. Line play, especially on the defense, has been more compact, and although the West developed such men as Schultz, the wonderful Michigan centre, and Benbrook, the equally remarkable guard, it cannot be said that there has ever been in the middle West a complete line that would have satisfied Eastern coaches.

To Dr. Williams, at Minnesota, a Yale man, belongs the credit for developing typical plays that did not depend, as did most of Yost's, upon the new game, but that were based on fundamental principles. In general it may be said that the Westerners are far readier to try a new idea than the

Easterners, and belong to the party of progress in football, while the Easterners sometimes suffer from excessive conservatism. On the Pacific Coast there has been nothing in football that could fairly be called typical. There have been many Eastern coaches at work in that section, but their methods have been for the most part such as are to be found in the East.

Before leaving the subject of team types a word should be said about Prof. Raymond G. Gettell, of Trinity, who has evolved a system peculiarly his own. Prof. Gettell is a graduate of Ursinus College, a small Pennsylvania institution, where by the way, they turn out excellent football teams. The point is, that while Prof. Gettell, who has had remarkable successes at Trinity, is himself an ex-football player, he has been a quite independent thinker, and has made the most of the open game, not hesitating to build his team on advanced lines, without any care for precedent or the experiences of others. It has been simply a case of applying brains to theoretical football, with the result that although short of coaching in individual technique, Trinity has turned out teams as distinct from those of the other small colleges as Harvard was from Yale, or Yale from Harvard in the old days. It is inevitable that in course of time, when, as has been said, the game approaches a standard, the novelty will wear off the Trinity system, but it has been one of the most interesting phases of the game since the radical changes in the rules.

Just where the strategy of the future will lead is beyond any but a prophet to say, but it is reasonably certain that with the generalship approaching a standard, the best outlet for coaching genius is in clever violation of standard principles, always provided that these violations are successful. With a common scheme, or nearly common scheme of generalship, it is obvious that in the course of time the strategist will have to figure on just how he would go about fooling himself were he coaching the opposing eleven, and will see his path to innovation through departing from the accepted idea just enough to retain all that is fundamentally sound while making sure that the variation will not disorganize his own eleven. In other words the guessing match will have to begin with a guess as to the other coach's opinion and expectation of any particular eleven, and end with a decision as to whether greater deception will be accomplished by doing the expected, or by doing the unexpected. ' Simply put, it is a case of matching coins all over again. This applies, of course, only to those coaching systems which are thoroughly up to date and in position to teach an ideal game theoretically.

"Tricks," or, as they are commonly called nowadays, "brainstorms," have occasionally won important games, but as a rule the novelties that endure and are absorbed into all the coaching systems are those that are based on some fundamental principle, like the timing of the charge, the catching of the defensive line in motion, etc. Undoubtedly there will be progress in the future in the direction of removing the waste so common in most systems to-day - the waste that consists in leaving a good man in the attack too far from the ball, simply to care for some good man of the defense who is also far from the ball. The serious flaw with the "sliding" defense to meet the sudden line shifts is that it has not taken care of the element of individual excellence. In other words, the side-stepped line is not as strong individually as the shifted line, for in such a defense, the best so far devised, it is impossible to meet the "pairing" of two powerful men in the offensive line by the pairing of two powerful men in the defensive line. There is plenty of work for all the strategists right here, and if the defensive system has not made the most of the personal element, it follows that the attack is in the same case, and may be developed beyond any point reached up to and including the season of 1912.

The advance will be the quicker, I think, when the great majority of teams have approached what seems to-day to be a reasonable standard. A great coach has said, "The game is still in its infancy," and this is undoubtedly true, but the next strategic step will come, I think, not through inspiration, but from sheer hard work on the basis of the experiences of all the great coaches.