The East

1958 SCHEDULES	(1957 scores):
SEPT. 27	Springfield College (33-14)
OCT. 4	at Union College (51-0)
OCT. 11	at Bowdoin (58-14)
OCT. 18	Coast Guard (42-0)
OCT. 25	at Wesleyan (21-0)
NOV. 1	Tufts (19-6)
NOV. 8	at Trinity (40-6)
NOV. 15	Williams (14-39)

Easterners are a hardy breed, alternately drenched, baked, quick-frozen and finally thawed in that area stretching roughly from Maine to Maryland and from the Atlantic seaboard to the western border of Pennsylvania. Is there any wonder then that the game of football they conceived one crisp November day 89 years ago has been able to survive four wars, various depressions and a severe case of de-emphasitis?

Eastern football was the best in the land for the first 50 years, but soon the superiority moved westward and southward. Still, the game owes its popularity and prestige to such pioneers as Princeton, Rutgers, Columbia, Yale, Harvard and Pennsylvania, former powers which were later among the first to tone down the game and keep the football tail from wagging the academic dog.

Today most of the East plays a low-keyed version of football which frowns on spring practice and special athletic scholarships for players, and it limits its opponents to those who do likewise. As a result, it is rarely possible to compare the best eastern teams to those in other areas. But it matters little to the Yales and the Harvards and the Browns and the Vermonts and the majority of other Easterners what the world thinks of their football. Watching the alma mater with blanket, flask and date is all that these fans ask of the game.

Proof of this lies in the fact that the East—which in 1957 produced only one bowl team, Navy, and hasn't had a national champion since Army in 1945—last year enjoyed a 6.6% increase in attendance, highest in the land. Folks in this part of the country love football and want to see it played by bona fide students, win or lose, and without the firing of coaches and hangings in effigy so prevalent elsewhere. As pioneers of the game, they hope they are setting a good precedent that the rest of the colleges will eventually follow. They like to think they see good football, too, and point to such expected powers as Army and Navy, Holy Cross, Princeton, Penn State and Pittsburgh. These and a few others will engage in a wide-open battle for the Lambert Trophy, which is awarded each year to the best team in the East, chosen by a vote of coaches, sportswriters and sportscasters.

Navy, which won the Lambert Trophy last year, along with a 20-7 victory over Rice in the Cotton Bowl, may very well keep it despite the fact that a lot of last year's best players have graduated. The Midshipmen are highly optimistic over their chances, and one big reason is a somewhat obscure quarterback, named Joe Tranchini. The reason Tranchini is obscure is that he wasted the first year of his eligibility sitting on the bench and watching another Navy quarterback named Tom Forrestal hog all the glory. Forrestal, it just so happens, was one of the best of his trade in the whole country. Tranchini, they will tell you down at Annapolis, can do everything a good quarterback should do and has displayed some of Forrestal's cool-headed daring. Even if the Middies enjoy another good year (they lost only two games in the last two years), a second straight bowl trip is not in the cards. Athletic Director Slade Cutter says Navy "definitely will not accept any postseason bowl games because the boys lost too much study time last year practicing for the Rice game."

Perhaps one reason for Navy's phenomenal success is the football philosophy of Coach Eddie Erdelatz, who claims that, after all, it is just a game and should be enjoyed as such. "We'll have a ball—we always do," Coach Erdelatz was heard to say recently, "I don't believe in all that high pressure stuff. I have the simplicity system. It's a few plays and few defenses. It has worked out all right."

Sometimes one suspects that Erdelatz may have just a bit of his tongue in his cheek when he speaks for publication, particularly in the following vein. "I tell my players there's no pressure on them to play, and if they can't have some fun to turn in their suits. No scholarship is at stake. The coaches also have fun. We have no 6 a.m. staff meetings, and there's plenty of time for golf in the afternoon two or three times a week. And no night sessions." The Middies, one might say, are so happy playing football that they literally dance while scrimmaging. It will be remembered that the men of Annapolis created quite a stir when they first used their so-called jitterbug defense.

"We don't anchor our men in concrete," Erdelatz explains when discussing this tactic. "They are moving around like jitterbugs before the ball is snapped. So far, nobody has found the solution to this defense."

In contrast to the light-hearted attitude of Erdelatz, Coach Earl Blaik of Army is a stern purveyor of the football doctrine, a man who demands perfection and often gets something approaching it from his teams. Under his direction, Army has twice been named the national champion in the annual Associated Press poll, and it has won the Lambert Trophy six times. His Black Knights have completed five unbeaten seasons, run up winning streaks of 32 and 28 games and have averaged less than two defeats a season. Perhaps Blaik's greatest coaching effort came in 1953, when he rebuilt an Army squad that was decimated by the wholesale dismissal of players involved in the unhappy cribbing scandal. The number of head coaches developed by Coach Blaik is now at 13, an alltime high in the profession. And in his 25 years of coaching, 18 of them at West Point, the Colonel has developed 26 first-team All-America players, including that extraordinary pair of backs, Glenn Davis and Doc Blanchard, who received this distinction three years running during the mid-1940s.

This year, Blaik has another pair of backs who will surely bring back memories of Blanchard and Davis. They are Bob Anderson, an All-America choice of many in his sophomore year last season, and Captain Pete Dawkins. This may well be the best pair of starting backs in the country, a combination which scored 25 of Army's 37 touchdowns last fall. Dawkins, a childhood victim of polio, is an exceptionally courageous and dedicated young man who is not only the team captain but also president of the senior class and the seventh-ranking scholar in his class.