No one who reads the papers or listens to the radio needs to be told that college football is no longer a miraculous money-maker. Harvard's team did not play before a single capacity crowd in the stadium during the season just ended. Yale's experience in the bowl was only a little happier. Dartmouth's income from gate receipts this fall was so meagre that the athletic council has been forced to abolish formal freshman teams in all sports except football. The experience of these three New England colleges is probably typical of gridiron conditions throughout the country. Except where the competing teams have been conspicuously victorious, as in the case of Brown and Colgate's game at Providence on Thanksgiving Day and of Army and Notre Dame's meeting in New York today, public interest has lagged and grandstands have remained half filled.

John R. Tunis, of the sports writers' left wing, sings rather an exultant dirge over the corpse in an Atlantic Monthly article. "Every evidence shows that the game is being killed," he concludes, "by its own excesses. To argue that this is good or bad is useless. Football's day is done." He attributes the collapse of the football boom of the 1920's to a realization on the part of undergraduates--first articulated by the Harvard CRIMSON in 1925--that the game had developed into a top-heavy exhibition for the glorification of a few for the amusement of the many, and to the general public's unwillingness to play "the good fairly" any longer. "Football common" was inflated by mob hysteria, he reasons, and is now being deflated by common sense. As a result, college athletics are headed toward a simpler and heal-their condition, where there will be more boys playing the game on the field than spectators watching them in the stands.

That Mr. Tunis's conclusions are essentially sound, few will deny. The outcome of the present season amply bears out the thesis of his article, which was probably written a month or two ago. But, as regards the New England situation at least, one wonders if his announcement of football's demise is not slightly premature. If tickets to the Harvard-Yale game had been $2.50 each instead of $4.00, would not the bowl have been filled last Saturday (assuming, of course, that the sun shone!)? Aren't such games, which serve as much as social gatherings as athletic spectacles, so deeply embedded in tradition that they will continue indefinitely? And, if the non-collegiate public has lost its taste for college games, won't the professional teams, which are gaining in popularity, keep the sport very much alive? No, football itself is not done. It is only the insane hoopla about beardless halfbacks that is evaporating. And its disappearance should have a sobering, wholesome effect on our colleges. --Boston Herald.