Last year the New York Sun gave an elaborate dinner in New York city in honor of the eleven collegians selected by the Sun as "the All-American Football Team of 1925." This year the Sun proposes to give a similar dinner for the eleven students whom that newspaper shall select as an "All-American Team for 1926." In our judgment this project ought to be abandoned; no such dinner should be given.

The Sun has begun to advertise the prospective dinner for 1926, claiming to have "created football history" by what it did in 1925 and naming in the advertisements several of the guests who were present last year, among their such coaches as "Ed" Hall and "Big Bill" Edwards. Now, as chairman of the rules committee, Mr. Hall spoke at the dinner, and he began his remarks by saying that while he did not wish to seem ungracious, he ventured, nevertheless, to express the hope that no newspaper ever again would undertake such a project in connection with American intercollegiate athletics.

The players at the head table last year had calcium lights over them, broadcasting apparatus before them, and adulation all around them. They were presented with gold watches and other "expressions of esteem." Among those seated at the guest table was Mr. C. C. Pyle--now commonly designated in the news columns as "Cold Cash" Pyle whom the redoubtable "Red," Grange insisted on having at his side. As a matter of fact, various sport promoters helped to promote this $10-a-plate banquet by taking tickets therefor.

Our dissent is based on the belief that this kind of thing is not good for the boys and not good for the game Mighty few college boys can stand such exploitation and publicity without getting bad cases of what commonly is known as a "swelled head." The discase is not fatal, but while it lasts it does its victims a deal of harm. Football is a spectacular game, anyhow, and the more formidable players are made the subjects of an extraordinary amount of hero worship and general publicity. Greatly to their credit be it said that many of these young men "come through" with their modesty and dignity unimpaired; but the atmosphere which must, pervade such a dinner, with its implications of commercialism of various kinds, is not good for them.

Nor for the game. Many of the ablest and most discriminating advocates of football as a college sport argue that the gridiron game stands emphatically not for the prowess of the individual, but for the ability of the team, that the game is founded on the perfect functioning of a machine in which the individual player is submerged, that the success of a team depends on the ability of eleven men to fuse themselves, mind and muscle, into a unit for a struggle with another group of eleven men who also strive not for personal glory, but for co-operative success. This dinner supports an entirely different thesis. It hoists the individual into the limelight and ignores the other ten men on his team to whom he knows what measure of personal achievement he has attained is largely, and often, almost wholly, due.

An All-American eleven after all is only an expression of opinion, and opinions differ. The Sun is an enterprising newspaper, but its selections represent only itself. The tendency to write up individuals and play down the team has gone far enough. We need to start current in the other direction. The "star system" of the stage ought not to be transported to the stadium.

Meantime it is interesting to notice that the Sun is querying our greatest universities in advance to know if any player who may obtain a place in the Sun's 1926 team will be allowed to come to New York for the proposed dinner. If before the issuing of any invitations the Sun may know that it would be useless to address invitations to certain institutions, the paper might still give its dinner, but its choice of an All-American team might seem some what disproportionate. Anyhow we hope the colleges themselves will reject these overtures as violations of the spirit for which intercollegiate football ought to stand. Boston Herald, Nov. 21.