Scorecard

BOWLING THEM UNDER

College football coaches are strong on the benefits of competition, but after what happened to bowl-bound teams last weekend, when several that had already been tapped were beaten (page 62), even they might agree that it can be overdone.

Bowl selection committees, under pressure from TV networks with which they are affiliated, have always pressed for earlier dates for choosing their teams. In response the NCAA adopted a rule in 1967 barring selection before the third week in November. It was honored in the breach, and this season the rule was dropped. The pressures against holding that dateline, apparently, were too great.

The NCAA, the bowls and the networks will do better for the game and themselves by readopting the bid-date rule and setting it back to, say, Dec. 1, when most teams have completed their schedules and the country has a fairly good idea who should be playing in the postseason games. If the three do not, they will get exactly what they deserve—large blocks of empty seats and TV ratings that won't stand up against those of " Mickey Mouse" reruns.

THE FALLS OF ACADEME

Sociologist Gideon Aran gives every impression of being a man who is onto something. The question is, what?

Jumping straight into his subject, he wrote in the American Journal of Sociology, "The unusual social aspects of parachuting provide a rich potential for sociological study." Then he turned the air cloudy.

"Within a few moments, the highly integrated collectivity that has dominated its individual members (prejump phase) changes drastically into a tenuous, anomic social situation that gives rise to a very egocentric individuality followed by a return to the former state (postjump phase). This bipolarity of parachuting provides a rare opportunity to study a nearly ideal-typical manifestation of extreme opposite social forms contained within an organizational setting. The sequence of the three phases of the jump, and the dialectical relationship between them, is analyzed here in terms of personal regression leading to social regression, and vice versa."

Sort of makes you hope the parachutes never open.

BAD SKATES (CONT.)