"There is no Ivy League ruling prohibiting 'practice' games with other schools prior to the start of the season." That was Athletic Director Bill Bingham's answer last night to the report that Harvard might in the future try to arrange a few practice tussles, possibly with Boston College or Boston University before the opening of the 1942 season.

Tune-up games, though never used at Harvard in recent years, are not uncommon in the Ivy League. Columbia staged an informal affair with a neighboring school the week before running into Brown, and Pennsylvania gave its Sophomores valuable game experience in two pre-season workouts with Bucknell and Muhlenburg.

The results of this extra bit of experience and seasoning were all too obvious at Philly on Saturday. With a practice scrimmage against a team other than the reserves, the Harvard eleven might have known what potentialities it actually had. Sophomores might have been able to gain the necessary poise that meant the difference between getting pushed all over the field or making a football game out of the opening fracas.

Only this year has pre-season contact work been a deciding factor in the outcome of the opening game on the slate. Formerly at the top of the Crimson schedule there was always a pushover game that proved to be little more than a long drink of water. Last year it was Amherst, in other years Bates and Brown were "breather" material in which it was possible to use the veterans only sparingly and concentrate instead on seasoning the all-important reserves for actual use in the "headline" games later on.

This year in answer to pressure from coaches, players, and alumni, Bill Bingham went out and eliminated the inevitably dull pushovers from the schedule.

Despite the resulting change in calibre of season opponents, there was no corresponding change in the preparations made for the game. Last year the Harlowmen spent three weeks getting ready for Amherst; this year they spent the same period of time preparing for Pennsylvania, one of the East's strongest teams--an outfit which had been drilling for almost five weeks.

The result was almost a foregone conclusion. Undoubtedly a longer preseason practice period would have helped, but that was out of the question because of the "Three Presidents' Agreement."

63 Substitutions at Yale

If the new substitution rule was ever justified, Saturday was the day. The new rule which went into effect this fall wiped out all the old restrictions on substitutions. A player can now go in or out of the game an unlimited number of times. Where formerly a man could not go back into the game, if yanked, until the start of the next quarter, now he is able to return on the next play.

The new rule received much adverse publicity before the start of the season from those who believed it would slow up the game and would make football a "game of specialists."

With all the substitutions that came streaming in and out of the game at Penn Saturday because of the nauseating heat, the time of the game was only two hours and 25 minutes. At Yale, where there were 63 substitutions in the game with Virginia, the game was over in two hours and 22 minutes. The referees consider it a very fast game if they can get it over in two hours and 10 minutes.

Coaches Stahl and Blackburn, Harvard's masculine Mata Haris, travelled to Ithaca Saturday to watch the next opponent in action against Syracuse.

Syracuse Attack "Screwball"

Cornell won, 6 to 0, but according to Stahl, the Big Red looked to be as good an outfit as the one that came here in 1938 and left with a 20 to 0 victory to its credit.

Most impressive in the Ithacans' win Saturday, according to Stahl, was the work of a pair of streamlined backs named Martin and McDonald; most startling observation was the fact that Cornell used four blocking backs against Syracuse--all of them weighing over 195 pounds.

Bufaline, the team's triple threat tailback, did not play Saturday because of a bad bruise, but he should be ready to go this week.

Stahl had little to report in the way of "Cornell offense." The Ithacans scored early in the game on a looping pass and from then on went on the defensive, and used only three or four basic plays.

Defensively, too, there was little to gain from scouting the game, as Coach Snavely used an unorthodox defense that could be used to stop only one thing--the screwball Syracuse attack--in which the center faced his own goal line when centering the ball and passed the pigskin through the air end over end instead of in the usual spiral fashion.