On the day before the Thanksgiving game that year the Faculty held a long meeting and decided that our two guards were ineligible. There wasn't a word of truth in it. They weighed two hundred and twenty pounds apiece and were eligible to the All-American team, but you couldn't make the human lexicons look at it that way. They found them deficient in trigonometry and canned them off the team. It was an outrage, because the two chaps didn't know what trigonometry meant even and couldn't take an examination. We had to call the trig. professor out of town by a telegram that morning and then have the suspended men demand an immediate examination. That worked, too; but every time we managed to preserve a glory of old Siwash, the Faculty seemed to get a little more crabby and unreasonable and diabolically persisted in its determination to regulate athletics. The next fall it was well understood when football practice began that there was going to be war to the knife between the Faculty and the football team. We were meek and resigned to trouble, but you can bet we were not going to sit around and embrace it. The longest heads in the school made themselves into a sort of an unofficial sidestepping committee; and we decided that if the Faculty succeeded in massacring our football team they would have to outpoint, outfoot, outflank and outscheme the whole school. Just to draw their fire, we advertised the first practice game as a deadly combat, in which the honor of Old Siwash was at stake. It was just a little romp with the State Normal, which had a team that would have had to use aeroplanes to get past our ends; but the Faculty bit. It held a special session that night and declared the center, the two backs and the captain ineligible because they had not prepared orations the spring before at the request of the rhetoric professor. That was first blood for us. We chased the Normalites all over the lot with a scrub team and Keg Rearick sat up nights the next week writing the orations. The result was we got four fine new dry-cleaned records for our four star players and the Faculty was so pleased with their fine work on those orations that we could scarcely live with it for a week.