CHAPTER XV
GRAFTON SCORES
The second team were not exempted from work on Saturday, rather to their annoyance, and it wasn’t until the Rotan College game was nearly half over that they were dismissed and allowed to flock over to the first-team gridiron and crowd into seats at the end of the stand.
Rotan had already scored once and the board announced “Grafton 0—Visitors 7.”
Rotan was a small college, but it rather specialized in football and its teams were invariably clever. Naturally the eleven blue-stockinged youths averaged superior to Grafton in age, size, weight and experience, and a defeat for the home team was a foregone conclusion. Rotan had played a mid-season contest at Grafton regularly every fall for six years, and in that period Grafton’s best performance was a 0 to 0 game four years previous. Rotan was a light team, as college teams went, but it knew a lot of football and provided just the experience that Coach Bonner desired for his charges at that period of development.
It was soon apparent to the second team members that their champions were in for a severe drubbing today. Rotan was using a wide-open formation and running her backs around the Grafton wings about as she pleased, varying this pastime by an occasional short punt and a quarter-back plunge at the center. The Rotan backs were tall and heavy and hard to stop even when the home-team players were fortunate enough to get to them. But it was the dazzling unexpectedness of the attack that was principally accountable for the helplessness of the Scarlet-and-Gray. Rotan’s forwards would string across the field almost from side line to side line, her backs would retreat ten and even twelve yards behind them, there would come a quick, short signal, the ball would go back, the back-field would start on the run to one side or the other, the ball would be caught by one or another of the moving backs, Grafton would come plunging through and then—well, then a blue-armed youth would be suddenly seen running blithely away with the pigskin tucked to his body and not a Graftonian nearer than five yards! How they did it not even the spectators could see. They seemed to possess an absolutely uncanny ability to guess where the openings were to be. Hanser, who was Hugh’s neighbor on one side, muttered disgustedly when a Rotan half had taken the ball over three white lines and placed it twenty yards from the home team’s goal.
“Why doesn’t Ted play his ends deeper?” he asked. “What’s the idea of tearing through and not knowing where the ball is? They can’t stop ’em that way. What’s Bonner thinking of, I’d like to know.”
“It looks to me,” said Bellows, from further along, “as if those fellows started before the ball. You watch this time, Frank.”
“I have watched, and they don’t. They’ve got it down pretty fine, that’s all. That full-back does start before the ball, but he runs back a little and he’s all right. Then when the ball is snapped he straightens out again and half the time he doesn’t get into the play at all. If one of those chaps would only fumble once it would be a cinch!”
“They won’t, though. They’re wizards at it. Watch the way they put Kinley out every time. Musgrave too.”
“Yes, and look at our ends. Might as well be sitting on the bench for all the good they do. If I was Ted I’d close the line up and make them show their hand more. That was Neil Ayer. They’ll have to quit that foolishness now, though. They won’t be able to run the ends inside the twenty.”