“Any of them. Like that end-around play the second sprung yesterday.”
“Oh, that one’s as old as the hills,” replied Jake contemptuously, helping himself to a third piece of toast. “So old we weren’t expecting it. Going to use your butter, Slim?”
Jim pushed it over. “Well, who do you suppose thought of it? And—and how?”
“Search me! Some one’s always springing new ones. It isn’t hard to make ’em up, but only one in a dozen amount to anything. A play may look great on a blackboard and not amount to a row of pins when you try it out against another team.”
“I suppose so. I guess there are lots of them, too.”
“A couple of hundred, probably. Whose apricots are those, Pep?”
“Mine. Want ’em?”
When the dish of stewed fruit had reached Jake and been sampled he resumed. “I don’t suppose there’s any limit to the different plays that could be invented. Of course, most of them would be a whole lot like a whole lot of others, and not many of them would be—er—practicable, but just consider that you’ve got, say, four backs and two linemen who can carry the ball and that there are eight holes for them to go through. There you’ve got forty-eight straight plays right off the reel. Then you’ve got all sorts of forward-passes, punts, drops and placements: maybe another twenty-five or thirty. And you haven’t started on fakes and tricks at all yet! Two hundred? I’ll bet there are three hundred already! And all over this benighted land Smart Alecks are sitting up with paper and pencils trying to dope out more. It’s a fearsome thought, if you ask me.”
“I suppose all the good plays have been used, anyway, by this time,” reflected Jim.