He will decide also, in this little private August seance, whether it will be worth while to move some of his veterans from their old positions to new, either to concentrate or distribute the strength of his team, and whether he is apt to be stronger in the kicking or the running game. The weight of his men will be a big factor, for all other things being nearly equal, the heavy man will be of the greater value. There will be some positions on the team in which weight will have to be sacrificed to speed, and others in which weight will be a commanding factor, and he is a poor coach indeed, who in laying out the skeleton plan of his team does not take into account the possibility of getting a new and stronger combination by shifting his experienced men. A center often makes a good guard or tackle, a substitute tackle sometimes develops into a first-class center, and bo on. Further, in contemplating these changes, the head coach will lake into account the individual strength of his coaching staff, relying sometimes more upon the coach than upon the player for a successful change in position.

In the end the head coach will consider the matter from the point of view of the opposing coach or coaches. I once heard a head coach say at one of these quiet August seances, "They say you can no longer run the ball under the present rules. Therefore, I'll run it." And he did run it, perhaps more successfully than any other coach that season. The head coach will attempt to evolve the game that he would teach had he ideal material, the game that would be advisable for strength in certain positions, and so on until he hits upon the game that seems best suited to his tentatively chosen eleven.

Coaches are constantly upon the two horns of a problem - whether to fit the plan of campaign to the available material, or drill the material to fit an ideal plan of campaign. Since in recent years football has shown a marked tendency toward standardization, however, the first course is the one generally adopted. The standard game is taught, and the changes in style that are specially adapted to weight or to speed, as the case may be, are taken up later in the season and serve as the basis for the hope of victory.

Despite the fact that after the radical rule changes of 1911 the defense against the running game did not show the falling off that had been expected in many quarters, there has remained an abiding faith in the ability of the attacking team to gain ground, ball in hand, in any part of the field, so that the running attack, far from dwindling in importance as it seemed likely to do before the extension of the forward pass zone behind the two goal lines, has shown marked progress. I take no serious risk in predict-ing that in the future the running game will show to the utmost advantage when backed up by high-class work in the other departments of play.

It is impossible to convince any first-class coach nowadays that the running game will never be consistently valuable. It sometimes happens that a team will have to be built largely around one man - a man like Brickley of Harvard, for instance, or Sprackling of Brown - and under such conditions the coach will naturally make the most of the open, or "loose ball" game. Granted a good center and a veteran pair of tackles, however, and there will be a natural drift toward the running game, toward sharp thrusts into the line, for, as so often has been the case, the tackles after the radical rule changes of 1911 have become once again the storm centers of modern football. Over them, inside and outside of them much of the ground will be gained, and on the attack they will be held largely responsible for making a path for the runner, doing the double duty of making the path for the runner and going on to engage the secondary defense, the latter nowadays the terror and despair of the offensive coach. It is this heavy burden that falls upon the tackles in any possible plan of campaign that makes their work so important and their selection at the earliest possible moment imperative.

Most coaches, when they find that they have a good pair of tackles, will plan to make a specialty of their work on attack, not infrequently changing the whole complexion of the line in order to let them work together. The ideal tackle should weigh close to 200 pounds and have a large share of speed and brains. If a light end is to play beside him some of the speed may be sacrificed to weight, whereas, if flanked by a heavy end and with heavy backs behind him, some of the avoirdupois may be dispensed with in the interest of speed. In a general sense what is true of the tackles is true of the entire team.

Every man should be fast, heavy and strong, for with pushing and pulling eliminated from the game there are innumerable occasions upon which a man has to stand or fall on his own sheer strength. Weight can be spared at quarter better than in any other position, and if the candidate is strong and active, a comparatively light center will fill the bill at the pivot position, especially if he be a good passer. Indeed, I think that a coach in picking out a center should sacrifice nearly every other quality, if necessary, to sure passing. Again, the lighter the backs, the heavier the line should be as a rule. Incidentally there never was a set of rules for the American game in which heavy forwards were not an important and a great deal of the time the deciding factor.

For this reason it may sometimes be necessary to go into the big game with personally rugged material that has at command only a certain small number of plays in which the men are letter perfect - plays, that, simple as they may be, are nevertheless executed with never failing power, If this heavy material be not available, then the head coach will have to make up in versatility what his men lack in ruggedness. In either case, the players must be well equipped with brains, for there is so much individual work nowadays, and the game is so shifty, that mere bull strength is no longer at a premium. Granting that weight, speed and brains are essential in line material, height is of less importance, save on the ends, where the wing men nowadays are expected to reach up and take the forward pass in mid-career, snatching it cleanly away from the eager, leaping, secondary defense.