There was a short note in the newspapers the other day stating that the Detroit professional football team will open its 1953 schedule on August 23 with an exhibition game at home. This brought up a point that has been bothering me for several weeks. The football season is just around the corner.

I suppose this means that the time has come to speculate on the fortunes of next year's eleven, but at the present time I can see no reason to believe that the trend toward better football teams in Cambridge should change. What really intrigues me is what the new ticket policy may do to attendance.

Last year Carroll F. Getchell, H.A.A. Business Manager, missed his guess by a scant 22,000. He had anticipated a seven game total of 124,000 where the actual sum was 102,576 paid admissions. This included a full house for the Yale game which grossed a sum in excess of $144,000 from 36,128 sun-drenched fans.

At any rate, I think more people will visit Soldiers Field next fall. Last year's numbers will be supplemented by those who didn't want to pay for one ticket and also by those who didn't want to pay for two. It should mean bigger and better parties among other things. Look at it this way. It cost something like seven bucks to take a date to the Dartmouth game. With a free ticket next year, it will cost almost half. And so the University has made its move to encourage polite social intercourse on the part of the undergraduates.

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Of course, whether the games will be more or less enjoyable next season is another question. The theory has been advanced that there is some correlation between the abandonment of the two platoon system and the female increment. Many people found it difficult to explain to their curious dates who all the people running around down on the field were. But then, on the other hand, there is the question of how these thrill seeking young girls will react to the lower scoring games which are almost certain to occur.

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Elsewhere is Cambridge, a Crimson shell hit the water for the first time this year and Harvey Love was ready of his second season as coach of crew. We remembered that Navy's great Olympic crew was also preparing for the new season with 14 consecutive wins behind it, minus only the coxswain of last year's first shell. The two crews meet at Annapolis late in May.

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Crimson athletics have met with only varied success this year, but I don't think that the situation that occurred one Saturday morning in the fall of 1949 will ever be approached. Harvard has started its second football season under Art Valpey a couple of weeks before and had succeeded in getting masacred by Stanford and then edged by Columbia. It was just before the Cornell game and two players were seated in the locker room "Well," one said to the other, "only seven games left."

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What with the scholar athlete and the new ticket policy, I had been under the impression that Harvard was becoming sports conscious. This illusion was shattered a few minutes ago when I asked a University operator the number of Newell Boathouse. "What was that last name?" she said.