A brand new approach to football coaching is waiting around for some bright coach to pick up from the back files of theses presented to the Social Relations Department.

Rocky Stone guard on three Crimson squads, won a summa last spring for his thesis on aggression in football. He thinks, and at least three eastern coaches agree with him, that his theories could eventually be very useful in coaching. The Navy also agrees; it has been paying all the expenses of testing, both for Stone's initial work last fall, and for a check experiment now being run at another Ivy League college by Stone's broth C. Elliott. It hopes to use the data obtained in formulating a test to determine how men will react under pressure of battle.

There were two parts to the test. The first, and most important from a psychological point of view, was designed to check the validity of the "frustration-aggression" theory, well-known to all Sec. Rel. 1 men.

Briefly, the "frustration-aggression" theory holds that a tendency to aggressive action builds up inside us as a result of frustrations, and that, as a corollary, we can work off these feelings of frustration by actually committing aggressive acts. In fact, we purge ourselves of aggressive feelings by being aggressive.

Used Thematic Apperception Tests

If this theory were true, Stone reasoned, football players after a really bloody and satisfying scrimmage would be far less aggressive-minded than before a practice, or after the season was over when they could no longer aggress freely. To test this hypothesis he used Thematic Apperception Tests (known affectionately as TATs) to find out their aggressiveness.

In a TAT, the subject is shown a picture and asked to describe the situation. What he sees in these somewhat ambiguous pictures is a very good indication of how he is feeling. (For instance, if he tells the story of a murder when shown a picture of a child sitting quietly by the fireside one can assume that he is fairly seething with aggressive ideas.)

The TATs were given to the members of the football team once before a practice, once after, and once some weeks after the end of the season. The same TATs were also given three times to a control group of ordinary students who did not have the opportunity of the football field to express aggression.

Seck Amount of "Covert Aggression"

The object of these tests, then, was to ascertain the amount of "covert aggression" (expressed in words and thoughts, but not in action) revealed by the two groups. The hypothesis was that before practice and after the season was over the football players would show roughly the same amount of aggressiveness in the TAT as the controls, but that after practice they would show much less because they had supposedly worked it off.

The results were entirely different.

During the season, the players and controls showed just about the same amount of aggressiveness. After the season, the football players fell abruptly, in spite of the fact that they now no longer had the opportunity to aggress easily.

Explains Now Thesis

In explaining this flouting of the "frustration-aggression" theory, Stone broke new ground. He listed three factors which induce aggression: 1, frustration; 2, worry about what other people will think about one's contemplated aggression; and 3, fear of retaliation, which produces a sort of defensive aggressiveness.

The original frustrations were presumably equal in football players and laymen, and could therefore be cancelled out. But the other two factors were obviously affected by whether you played football or not.