That college footballers receive recompense, financial or otherwise, is a fact which, ever since it dawned on them a decade or so ago, has excited sportswriters almost as much as it has bored the rest of the U. S. public. That the racket of proving that college football as a racket is interminable was suggested again last week by an article by solemn Sportswriter John R. Tunis in the American Mercury. Last summer, in a book called Was College Worth While? Harvardman Tunis saluted his alma mater's tercentenary by trying to show that most of his 1911 classmates were failures (TIME, Sept. 14). In More Pay for College Football Stars, Sportswriter Tunis announced that college teams throw games, proposed dividing U. S. colleges into professional, semiprofessional and amateur groups, delicately assigned 100 U. S. institutions to the classes in which he thought they belonged.* Meanwhile on hundreds of gridirons throughout the U. S. the 1936 football season proceeded, no more calmly than usual, according to schedule.
While the week's biggest crowd helped defray mortgage interest of $200,000 on its huge stadium, Pitt, beaten fortnight ago by little Duquesne, recovered to give Notre Dame its worst defeat since 1925— 26-to-0. Spearhead of the Pitt attack, and author of one Pitt touchdown was the youngest player on the field, Marshall ("Biggie") Goldberg, stocky sophomore who, next morning, celebrated his 18th birthday by reading that the country's ablest football writers had picked him as a prospect for the 1936 All-America.
Defeated only once this season, fast coming of age as a major football power in the Pacific Coast Conference, University of California at Los Angeles, paced by Fullback Billy Williams who broke a 13-to-13 tie with a place kick in the last quarter, beat Oregon State 22-to-13.
Before last week's game with Navy, Princeton alumni found in the envelopes that contained their tickets a polite note signed by President Harold W. Dodds, asking them to refrain from drinking in Palmer Stadium. After the game, 7-to-0 for Princeton on a third-quarter, trick-play touchdown by Ken Sandbach, Princeton's impudent, long-nosed, snooping campus police could find only ten empty whiskey bottles, against 500 after the Rutgers game fortnight before.
No team coached by Duke's Wallace Wade has ever beaten a team coached by Tennessee's Bob Neyland at Knoxville. Undefeated Duke last week kept its hopes of a national championship intact until two minutes before the game ended. Then Tennessee Halfback Thomas ("Red") Harp's 70-yd. runback of a Duke punt wrecked them, saved the Tennessee jinx, 15-to-13.
St. Mary's Press Agent Tom Foudy boasted that 500,000 people would watch the team this year. St. Mary's rooters boasted two special trains for their annual two-week $54,000 transcontinental junket. St. Mary's players boasted scarlet shirts with white shoulders, decorated with green harps, blood-red headguards, emerald-green silk trousers, royal-blue stockings. Fordham had nothing to boast about except one point-result of Andy Palau's place kick after a touchdown on his pass to Jacunski-that outweighed two St. Mary's field goals, 7-to-6.