End (American football)

“ That is, he must remember that, while on one side of him there is the tackle, who will do his utmost to help him out, there is on the other side—that is, towards touch—no one to assist him, and a run around the end means a free run for many yards. "Force the man in" is always a good motto for an end, and one he will do well to follow conscientiously. ”

“ There is no limit to the amount of work an end may perform in this direction. A good end can toss his man back so that he cannot interfere with the play, and then cross over so quickly as to perform effective interference even upon end runs. ”

“ It’s a game of young men with big shoulders and hard muscles. It’s also a game of old pros, such as, 38-year-old Charlie Conerly quarterbacking the New York Giants to a football championship.
Football is popcorn, cokes, banners and cigaret smoke. It’s people standing for the kick-off, lap blankets, pacing coaches, penalties and melodious alma maters.
Football is a game of surprises. The big guy everybody picks in pre-season as All-American fizzles out. But a kid nobody ever heard of scores the winning touchdown and a star is born. ”

“ If by the passing down from father to son and from brother to brother of a spirit of cheerful self-denial throughout the hard fall months—of grim doggedness under imminent defeat and of fair play at all times, whether victor or vanquished—a finer, truer sense of what a man may be and do is forged out of the raw material, then football may feel that it has served a purpose even nobler than that of being simply America's greatest college game. ”

“ Not only is football a great and worthwhile sport because it teaches fair play and discipline, but it also teaches the number one way of American life—to win. We are living in an era where all our sympathy and interest goes to the person who is the winner. In order to stay abreast with the best, we must also win. The most advantageous and serviceable lesson that we can derive from football is the intrinsic value of winning. It is not the mere winning of the game, but it is teaching the boys to win the hectic battle over themselves that is important. ”

“ In fact, the desire to win has become so firmly established in the minds of college men that we now have a finished product in our [Pg 351] great American game of football—wonderfully attractive, but very expensive.
Competition has grown to such an extent that our coaching systems of to-day resemble, in a way, the plans for national preparedness—costly, but apparently necessary. All this means that the American football man, like the American captain of industry, or the American pioneer in any field of activity, is never content to stand still. ”

“ You can't be expected to appreciate the delicate strokes of play, the turns by which a game is lost and won—it takes an old player to do that—but the broad philosophy of football you can understand if you will. ”

“ Why, that inferior team wins! She may make mistakes, she may play ragged ball, but grim determination and fight and spirit get her there! You see it happen all the time. I can tell you of twenty games where the best team was beaten just because, while she wanted to win, she didn’t want to win hard enough!”
“Yes, sir, I guess that’s so,” agreed Joe. “And I guess it’s a lot easier to teach a team to play good football than it is to put the right spirit in them.” ”

“ The general public cannot understand the seriousness with which college athletes take the loss of an important game. There is a Princeton football Captain who was so broken up over a defeat by Yale that, months after on the cattle range of New Mexico, as he lay out at night on his cow-boy bed and thought himself unobserved, he fell to sobbing as if his heart would break.
A football victory to many men is as dearly longed for as any goal of ambition in life. ”

“ Those who to-day are prone to decry football as a rough and brutal sport—which it no longer is—might at least reverse their opinions of the present game, could they have spent a certain lurid afternoon in the fall of '87 at Jarvis Field where the elevens of Harvard and Princeton fought a battle so sanguinary as to come down to us through the years legended as a real crimson affair. ”

“ The evolution of football from the crude form in which the game began to the present stage of perfection it has attained rests almost entirely on the development of team play. Where originally one man, relying almost entirely on his own efforts, bore the brunt of his own particular play, whether offensive or defensive, now the efforts of ten others are also exerted to the same end for which he is working. ”

“ Men who were tackles, are still meeting their opponents with the same [Pg 70] intrepid zeal. The men who played at end in those days, are to-day seeing that nothing gets around them in the business world. The public is the referee and umpire. It knows their achievements in the greater game of life.
It is not my purpose to select an all-star football team from the long list of heroes past and present. It is not possible to select any one man whom we can all crown as king. We all have our football idols, our own heroes, men after whom we have patterned, who were our inspiration. ”

“ First, the boys are tired and in order to get proper execution and coverage we insist they give that “little extra,” which I feel is so important in order to build a winner. Secondly, the boys know there is no time limit and we are going to work on this phase of our football program until we do it to my satisfaction. Therefore, they strive extra hard to get perfect execution and coverage so we can end practice. We feel if the boys can learn to execute the kicking game perfectly while they are tired, they will do it perfectly during the actual game. ”

“ It is better football to make for a hole and to depend on your end rush to hold the opposite end off. A down inside the end is better than a hard run away around with the risk of being forced beyond the line. A two-inch gain is better than a run across the field. What the team needs most is a good punter and place kicker, and the ends ought to learn to get down the field quicker on punts, and to follow the ball better than they do now.
A great many letters come to this Department every week asking questions and making suggestions. ”

“ A player must be dedicated to the game to the extent he is willing to work, sacrifice, cooperate and do what he possibly can to aid the team in victory. It is our duty as coaches to explain and show our boys the advantages of being winners, and to impress upon them the absolute necessity of it so they will put forth the much needed effort to accomplish the objective. It is important for the players to understand that football is not an easy game; nor is achieving fame an easy task. ”

“ So I hope you [170] fellows will respond heartily to our appeal, remembering that you are giving to the School and aiding it in its struggle for football preeminence. You all want to witness a victory over Adams, and the first step toward the—the realization of that desire is to put the Team on its feet financially. Captain Hopkins has a few words to say before we proceed to business. ”

“ If the quarterback is faking the ball to the fullback, the 9 man must “search” the fullback for the ball first. The 9 technique man never crosses the line of scrimmage. If the offensive play is a straight back pass, the 9 man delivers a blow to the end, and drops back two or three yards looking for the screen or short pass. He is in a position to come up and make the tackle if the quarterback gets outside of your outside rusher and the quarterback decides to run with the football. ”

“ Their achievements are a distinguished part of the university's history—a part of our lives as university men—and we are ever ready now to burn incense in their honor, as we were in the old days to burn bonfires, in celebration of their deeds.
It is well now that we recall some of the men who have stood in the front line of football; in the making and preservation of the great game. Many of them have not lived to see the results of their service to the sport which they deemed to be manly and worth while. ”

“ Pugilism without the gloves having been forbidden by law in America, the free and equal inhabitants thereof must e’en look round for a form of sport which would allow of their “lamming the hides off one another” without being pulled up short by the police; and they settled on football. The essence of American football is not to kick or punch the ball, but to kick, punch, break up, deface and destroy the next man. On all American football fields a squad of surgeons, bonesetters, and nurses have to be in continual attendance. ”

“ The attack will never be alike in any two years, unless the very same men compose the team. The peculiarities of the men will determine how the attack should be arranged. Games cannot be won without a strong, consistent offense, yet the time devoted to its development will be comparatively little in some years, while in others it will remain the all-important problem up to the very end of the season. It is poor policy to interrupt the work of two scrimmaging elevens solely to correct individual faults. Remember these lessons and impress them upon the football candidate at some other time. ”

“ From the side lines we see the men put their shoulders to their work, charging and pushing [Pg 408] their opponents aside to make a hole in the line, through which the man with the ball may gain his distance; or we may see a man on the defensive, full of grim determination to meet the oncoming charges of his opponent. As we glance at the accompanying picture of a Yale-West Point game, we will observe the earnest effort that is being made in the great game of football—the crash of conflict. ”

“ All football players do not come out of the great game unscathed physically or morally, yet the great majority who do achieve benefit from it, and marked benefit too, amply demonstrate the value of the game as a source of all-round development.
Football is undoubtedly the best American game, not only from the average spectator's point of view, but from that of the player as well. ”

“ A scramble, a struggle?—assuredly, but so is football, and both are worth it for the thrill of the contest, even if you cannot win the championship. And those cares? responsibilities? Yes, they are there in abundance, but all as normal parts of the game. Bucking up against them adds to the zest, and losing is better than not playing on the team at all. And if you are disabled and carried off the field—hard luck, but that's nothing against the game itself. ”

“ On the part of the public there is general appreciation of the spirit which these two academies have brought into the great autumn sport, a spirit which combines with football per se the color, the martial pomp, the elan of the military. The merger is a happy one, because football in its essence is a stern, grim game, a game that calls for self-sacrifice, for mental alertness and for endurance ”

“ And in his Senior year he was on the team, the champion football team of America. The fearless way he used to charge down the field like a fighting elephant and smash those old-fashioned flying wedges—by flopping down in front of them—is now a matter of football history. ”

“ Our records will remain as we left them on the gridiron. Many a man is recalled in football circles as the one who lost his temper in the big games and caused his team to suffer by his being ruled out of the game. Men say, "Why, that is the fellow who muffed a punt at a critical moment," or recall him as the one who "fumbled the ball," when, if he had held it, the team would have been saved from defeat.
You recall the man who gave the signals with poor judgment. Maybe you are thinking of the man who missed a great tackle or allowed a man to get through the line and block a kick. ”

“ Doubtless there were those who suffered in silence, fearing lest they be taken out, if their real condition were made known; and every man was wild to finish in what promised to be the most exciting football game that had ever happened in the tri-school league. ”

“ The man who cannot start, catch, pass, tackle, block and interfere is not a real football player. There is no telling at what moment he may be called upon to use his versatility to save or to win the game. A championship contest may easily depend on whether one individual can catch a punt, tackle a runner, block an opposing player or interfere properly for his own team mate. ”

“ He remembered the day when Mark had been coaching the football team and had told them that they must not stop for anything when they were in action. If they thought their legs were broken, or they were mortally wounded and dying, they must not even think of it. Football was the one thing, and they were to forget they were dead and go ahead with every whiff of punch there was in them, blind or lame, or dead even, because when they were playing, football was the only thing that counted. ”

“ The past season, therefore, so far as I am able to find out, the Madison High-School team has been made up strictly of students of the school, and the players have taken up football for the sport of the game, rather than for the sake of the empty honor of a championship. This "championship" business is getting to be very much overestimated and exaggerated, and may eventually do much harm to sport ”

“ If the game opens in this way, there is, of course, a great rush by the partisans to capture the ball and keep it moving one way or the other; but if at the first toss up it falls to the ground, there is a tussle of all the middle men to see which one shall get it with his stick that puts civilized football in the shade. ”