Word: valpey
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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This worship of the T formation shows a complete abandonment of rational evaluation. Dick Harlow used the single wing for seven years at Harvard before the war, and nobody complained. Fritz Crisler and Benny Oosterbaan use the single wing at Michigan and have collected three straight conference titles. Art Valpey used the single wing last year, won four games, and nobody squawked. Yet now after Harvard has had a dismal season, everybody thinks the single wing is no good...
...single wing is just as good a football system as the T-formation; otherwise, nobody would use it. Art Valpey was brought up in Fritz Crisler's single wing system, one which has proved itself in the toughest football league in the country. Valpey knows the single wing thoroughly, so why should he switch to the T? When Harvard scored two touchdowns against Army--and gained more points than any other Army opponent this season, incidentally--it was not the excellence of the players that did it. Harvard had but two first-string men on the field during these drives...
There are those who say that Valpey ought to adapt his system to fit his players, the way "good old Dick Harlow used to do." But Harlow never changed his basic patterns in his system; he only adjusted the razzle-dazzle from year to year to fool the opposition and fit his players...
...change the frosting, but you can't change the cake. For Valpey to shift now from the single wing to the T would be to undo all the work on fundamentals that his staff has developed in two years...
...reason why Harvard won only one game this fall was because it lacked material. Most of the veterans from last year's squad were hopelessly handicapped by recurrent injuries which slowed them while they played, and often prevented them from playing at all. Yet Valpey had to use these semi-injured players because there was nobody else. Harvard had less depth, fewer able-bodied and capable men, than any of its 1949 opponents. When the first team got hurt, there just weren't any more players. Mean-while Princeton, Yale, Dartmouth, Brown. Columbia, Army and Cornell had two platoons...