nt on the part of the
captain and the manager. Before the team was in any condition to perform
such hard work, games were arranged with Tufts College, Boston A. A.,
M.I.T., and Dartmouth. Each one of these teams was heavier than the
Exeter eleven, and as a result several P.E.A. men are limping about the
Academy grounds, and one or two men will not play football again this
fall. The game against Dartmouth, especially, was hard for Exeter. In
bucking the Hanover rush-line five of P.E.A.'s best men were hurt.

The most serious loss was Hawkins, the quarter-back. The other men
behind the line had come to depend considerably upon him, and when
Martin was put in his place they went to pieces. Perhaps they should be
not too severely blamed for this, for Martin is a wretched player and
ought never to be allowed at quarter-back again until he learns a good
deal more about the game. In the Tufts game Martin passed the ball on
more than one occasion to his opponents. When Thomas took his place in
the second half there was a slight recovery from the previous
demoralization, but P.E.A. did no scoring. If Exeter had arranged her
games against lighter and weaker teams in the early part of the season,
and had fixed the dates with these older men for now and the following
weeks, her players would have been better able to stand the hard work
required of them.

It is just this sort of thing that brings football into disrepute with
people who don't know anything about the game. They see in the papers
that Brown, Jones, and Robinson are hurt as a result of playing
football. They do not stop to reflect that possibly Brown, Jones, and
Robinson had no business playing the game, but at once decry football.
Possibly if Brown, Jones, and Robinson had been put on horseback and
trotted around a field they would have been much lamer, and certainly
they would have been much more liable to get their necks broken. Take
two elevens in training and let them play a game; there will be no one
hurt in all probability. Take twenty-two men who are not in any kind of
training and set them loose on a gridiron for two fifteen-minute halves
and see how many doctors you will need at the end of the game. That's
the secret of most of the outcry against football. Half the men who get
hurt would not have gotten hurt if they had gone at it properly, and it
is almost always of these fellows that the general public gets reports.
There is a good deal for the general publ