When the U. S. Academies at West Point and Annapolis agreed last summer, after a three-year breach of athletic relations, to resume playing football with each other, they failed to settle the differences on which the breach was based. Navy like other colleges observes the three-year eligibility rule; at West Point cadets who have played three years of varsity football elsewhere are still eligible for the team. This gives West Point an obvious advantage in Army-Navy games. Navy has not won since 1921. In last week's game, closing the football season for the East, stout-hearted Navy tried hard, but anyone could see that Army had more power, more experience. Its team was precisely as much better than Navy's as the score, 20-to-0, showed.
Army's first touchdown came in the second quarter. After a 54-yd. march down Franklin Field, Quarterback Pick Vidal plunged through centre across the goal line. Navy played tenacious football and had bad luck with penalties and passes in the second half. In the last quarter, Army's substitute Left Halfback Jack Buckler threw a 34-yd. pass to Bill Frenzel, who caught it on Navy's 6-yd. line, fell into the end zone as he was tackled. Five minutes before the game ended, Buckler did most of the work on a 40-yd. march in twelve plays and went around his right end for the last touchdown.
One of Army's points in the discussion of eligibility rules has always been that many of its best football players would be eligible anywhere. Jack Buckler, a yearling from Waco, substitute this season for Ken Fields, is a case in point. So is rapid little Quarterback Vidal. Brother of a famed Army end, Gene Vidal, who was on the team in 1916-17, he finished school at 15, waited a year, entered Wrest Point when he was still under age. This season, his first as a member of the first-string team, he was Army's best broken field runner. He will be graduated next spring at 20.
Auburn, ready to clinch the Southern Conference championship against South Carolina at Birmingham, ran up a comfortable lead of two touchdowns in the first half. South Carolina made a 60-yd. march to a touchdown in the third quarter but it did not seem important; Auburn scored again soon after the kickoff. Then, in the last quarter, after a weak Auburn punt, South Carolina completed two passes for a touchdown; an Auburn fumble opened the way for another. South Carolina's Quarterback Hal Mauney kicked the goal that ended the game 20-to-20. first time Auburn has been tied this year. Tennessee, by beating feeble Florida 32-to-13, and Louisiana State ended the season in a triple tie with Auburn for the championship. In a poll of 31 sportswriters on southern newspapers, 22 favored giving the title to Tennessee for winning seven conference games to Auburn's six, with one tie each.
Alabama's Captain John ("Hurry") Cain cut through St. Mary's right tackle on his own 29-yd. line, swerved toward the left side of the field, wriggled away from three tacklers and sidestepped two more on his way to the goal. After 57 more minutes of bruising, grunting, thumping, kicking and pounding, the score still remained Alabama 6, St. Mary's 0, at San Francisco.
Nebraska, Big Six champion, ended its season with a trip to Dallas and a beating, 21-to-14, for Southern Methodist.