Norwich bulletin., 1916-11-18
eRIDIRoN EXPERTS FEW.
Average Football Crowd Quite a Con-
 trast to Baseball Followers.


 How many persons know anything about football?
 That is question one is tempted to ask himself after reading some of the fiction football" stories which bloom at this time of year and more especially after listening to some of the comments made by rooters during important games. The conclusion ar rived at is that the person who haSl even fair working knowledge of the gridiron sport is indeed rara avis. There are scores and hundreds of rooters who have watched football games for several years who do not know even the rudimentary working principles of the game, to say noth- ing of the finer points which lie hid den to the eyes of all except the most expert coaches, says l.. G. Sullivan.
 The average football crowd is quite a contrast to the average baseball crowd. Your baseball crowd knows baseball, or at least he knows enough about it to appreciate it and not make foolish breaks by condemning the of ficials for perfectly proper decisions. He may not be thoroughly familiar with the infield fly rule or the balk rule; he may be constrained to differ with the official scorer in the question of allotment of hits and errors, but on the whole he has pretty good working knowledge not only of the rules, but of the strategy of the game. The baseball fan like one overheard by the writer, who asserted that pitcher in a world series passed the first man up in every inning to make the second hit into a double play, still lives, but his name is not Legion.
 One of the most remarkable maga- zine football stories of the present season, printed in one of the leading magazines of the country concerned itself with tho activities nf 9 nl9Vpr who, with a broken arm, carried the ball on tWenty-tWo consecutive plays, each for gain of two yards, thereby winning the game. Granting that a superman of this type might exist, , there are several other amazing parts of the story. In one place +he writer, declares that this game was before the day of forward passes, yet he cheerfully tells of the game being di- Vided into quarters. To make the story still more complicated, he in troduces the coaches of the contend ing teams as going out on the field and coaching their men between the first and second and third and fourth quarters. He neelects to state what the officials were doing all this time.
 Another story of this year told of a football player who scored two points and a victory on a play which could not unde" the rules be decided as any thing save a touchback. These are
 
 art: the list could be strung out in te1minably. There are only two writ CTS of football fiction whose works are accurate according to the rules, the first-now, don't laugh-Burt Stand ish. who used to write, and may still write, the Frank Merriwell stories, and Ralph Henry Barbour, who has contributed an interesting series of yarns to the Daily News sporting page.
 Few of the rooters know the rules accurately. Every time one goes to a game one hears rooters exclaiming that this team has been penalized five yards for holding, that that team has been pena1ized fifteen yards for off, | side or that the other team has been penalized twenty yards for delaying | the game. These are of so frequent occurrence that one ceases to pay at | tention to them. The never ending | source of wonder, however, is that so 1 few persons understand the rudiments l of the forward pass; that the ball is l dead the minute it strikes the ground | unless temporarily held and fumbled | by some player. Every time the ball hits the ground on one of these plays one can hear the rooters eagerly inn | ploring one of their favorites to grab l the dead ball and run for touchdown.