I certainly would have expected the blokes at Harvard to know that a football isn't a spheroid, at least in today's world. Back when the fight song was written the American football was closer to a spheroid than it is now, but I believe it still had pointed ends, which a true spheroid lacks.

Somewhere I have a picture of my father dressed in his football uniform from Menominee, Michigan, HS, circa 1917 and you can see the rounder but still pointed ball. This was before the era of the forward pass, which only became feasible with the skinnier ball.

According to family legend, The Old Man used to play HS football on Saturday afternoon, then get on a train to go 50 miles south where on Sunday he played semi-pro ball under an assumed name for a company team called the Green Bay Packers. He had to use an assumed name because accepting $20 a game would have lost him his amateur standing to play HS ball. Later, when he went to college he backed up some Swedish guy named Grange at U. of Illinois.

TEd


TEd