“I don’t believe he will be back here next Fall,” said Lyons. “Not at a thousand dollars, anyway; and it isn’t likely we can pay more. I guess it will be a case of graduate coaching for us. Then—good night!”
“Aren’t graduate coaches satisfactory?” asked Ira.
“They are if they know their business,” replied Lyons, “but the ones that do are either drawing down good salaries coaching somewhere else, like Tom Nutting and Howard Lane, or they’re too busy to give more than a fortnight to the team. You can’t expect a man who is getting started in business to throw it up for two months to coach a football team. And you can’t expect a man who is getting twenty-five hundred or three thousand coaching some other team to leave his job and come here for a thousand. Unfortunately, Rowland, the fellows who would come for a thousand aren’t worth it. Good football players are plentiful, but good football coaches are as scarce as hens’ teeth.”
“I wonder,” mused Gene, “what would happen if every school coached itself. I mean, suppose it was agreed that no graduate was to have anything to do with the teams. What would it be like?”
“We’d all play punk football,” responded White, “but we’d have just as much sport. And a heap less trouble.”
“Schools wouldn’t stick to the agreement,” said Lyons. “They’d begin to sneak in fellows who weren’t real students so they could take hold of the teams.”
“Oh, come, Fred! There are some honest folks in the world,” protested Gene.
“A heap of them, son, but when it comes to winning at games there’s something a bit yellow about us. Fellows who wouldn’t crib at an exam, will do all sorts of shady tricks to put it over a rival team. I guess it’s because we want to win too hard. Still I’d like to see it tried out, that ‘no graduate need apply’ idea.”
“So would I,” said White, “but I’d rather some other school started it.”
“I’d certainly hate to see the scheme applied to track athletics,” said Gene, shaking his head dubiously. “It wouldn’t work there.”