A One-Man Team
“Two thirty today, boys,” announced the Coach. “How many can be there?”
“I have a class till three,” said Dickie.
“Me too,” said big Wickham.
“Cut ’em if you can,” said the Coach. “If you can’t, hustle out as soon as you’re through. We don’t get any too much daylight.”
Monday lunch at the training-table was over. The squad, chatting noisily, dispersed to afternoon tasks. The Coach and his three aids remained seated, for there were things to talk over.
It was the final week of the season, and the Doane game loomed large ahead. Harris had scouted the big rival school’s battle with Monroe on the preceding Saturday, and the others waited for him to offer his report.
“It’s a one-man team, Coach, just as Wallace and Dana told us,” he said. “Just take Davis out of their backfield, and they couldn’t score on the North Side Y.M.C.A.”
“Yes,” said the Coach, “but who’s going to ‘just take Davis out of their backfield?’ ”
“Well,” said Wallace, “you oughtn’t to be afraid of these one-man outfits after what you did to Monroe and Benjamin. Benjamin was their whole team, and what did he do against us? He might as well have been muzzled and on a leash. If he got away with anything, it was between halves.”
“There’s a difference between Monroe and Doane,” put in Dana. “All those Monroe coaches know about working up an attack, you could put on a souvenir postcard and mail it anywhere for one cent. Benjamin didn’t have as much protection as a kewpie. There was nothing for him to work with. I’m not trying to take away any credit from Coach, but I never saw a team give less help to a star than Monroe gave to Benjamin. It will be another thing again with Doane. They’ll have stuff built up round Davis that they didn’t show when we were watching them. Smith’s no fool.”
“I didn’t say he was,” retorted Harris. “He’s a good, smart coach and can construct as shifty an attack as you’d want to see. I don’t claim he cut loose with everything he had, for my benefit. But you know as well as I do that ninety percent of his offense is Davis. And you know Coach’s reputation for making a monkey out of that kind of an offense.” He smiled at his chief. “You deserve the rep’, don’t you?”
The Coach smiled back.
“I guess I do,” he said. “I guess Pelham and Marshall will admit that I do. Either one or the other of them had a one-man team the last three years I was at Leighton, and in those three years I didn’t lose a game. One year, Marshall had Kirby. Another year, Pelham’s whole attack was built round a big kid named Hostetter, a plunger. And the third year, it was Marshall again, with Flynn.”
“Was that the kicker?” asked Wallace.
“That was the kicker, and he was the best I ever saw. Their stunt was to let him punt on first downs when the ball was within thirty-five or forty yards of their own goal. They depended on him to gain in the exchanges till they got into the other side’s territory. Then they had a few plays that were to carry them up to where he could dropkick. He might have been harder to beat if I hadn’t had a pair of ends whose middle name was Block, and a quarterback who didn’t know how to drop a punt.
“Another thing in my favor was that Flynn was a frail kid and they were afraid to let him carry the ball. So they couldn’t fake much with him.
“Well, sir, I never saw such an exhibition of distance kicking as he gave against us—and I never saw punts run back as far as we ran them. I had two men, instead of one, to protect my quarter on his catches, and I had my ends lay back about fifteen yards and take the first fellows that came to them. My quarter ran seventy yards for a touchdown after one catch, and he carried another to within easy plunging distance of their goal. And Flynn never got close enough to our end of the field to see the posts.
“The year Pelham had Hostetter, I played my secondary defense so close up that he really had to plunge through two lines instead of one—though he didn’t plunge through either. But he was all they had, and they kept trying him, even when the whole crowd was yelling at them to let up on their star before he was killed. He’d plunged Pelham to victory on seven successive Saturdays, but he did most of his plunging toward his own goal when he ran up against us.
“Then there was the year that Marshall had Kirby. He was a boy a good deal on the Davis order; he could run and dodge, and he could pass as far as most people can kick. Well, I had a live center, that season, and two good defensive backs. I picked those
