Defense Catches Up?

It was the upset of the week. Twice-beaten Princeton slew Pennsylvania, the Goliath of the Ivy League, 17-14. After the game, elated Princeton rooters tried to carry away the goal posts, and had to be deterred by the cops (see cut).

Penn, rated the third best team in the U.S., had expected only a vigilant defense. Defense is in a renaissance in 1946, and the Ivy League--partly out of self-preservation--had done as much as anyone to revive it. Penn's strategists warned players that Princeton used 17 known defensive alignments.

Against the T, Princeton's progressive Coach Charlie Caldwell does indeed work such tricky devices as the undershifted six, the overshifted five, the looping line.* But so long as Penn used its single wing offense, Caldwell confined himself to three basic defense formations.

In the first period, when Pennsylvania shifted briefly to a T, moved 80 yards against his "4-3-1-2-1" for a touchdown, Caldwell rushed a sub into the game with instructions to switch to the "wide six" defense. Penn's march slowed to marking time, and one minute before game's end, Princeton's Ken Keuffel broke a 14-14 tie with a 19-yd. field goal.

Boring, but Necessary. In nearly all big college football camps, a deceptive defense had now become almost as important as a tricky offense. Said Notre Dame's Frank Leahy: "Defense has always bored me ... it's not stimulating. But I'm stressing it this season." In six games this year, Army's Coach Earl Blaik swore that his opponents had not used the same defense two plays in a row. The trick was to keep the offense off balance, mix up their blocking assignments. Michigan's defensive quarterback sometimes called for a four-man line with five backers-up. Some defense-happy coaches even thought that the unstoppable T--with its emphasis on speed, deception and "brush blocking"--was on the way to being stopped by equally unpredictable defense. But so far, the scores of a good many top T teams (among them, Notre Dame and Army) did not yet bear them out.

*In the looping line, when linesmen move to the left, line backers shift to the right, to cover up the holes.

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