Cutting football down to size

ANNAPOLIS — The first thing one notices is the size of the players. Or, rather, the lack thereof.

This looks like any other practice session for any other college football team — except that everyone appears to be so, well, normal in size.

There are no offensive linemen with bellies the size of three pumpkins drooping over their uniform pants. There are no sculpted, 250-pound linebackers, no 225-pound fullbacks with the physique of a 6-foot fireplug.

The reason for the fat-free football isn’t lousy recruiting.

It’s all by design in the Collegiate Sprint Football League, a league meant to give guys the size of, say, a Donald Rumsfeld — in his physical prime, of course — a place to play.

In this league for lightweights, players still don pads and uniforms, Army still plays Navy and — to some, at least — the games still matter. The difference is that the players can weigh a maximum of 165 pounds.

“It’s like college football, but it’s not,” said K.C. Dalton, a 5-foot 10-inch, 165-pound offensive tackle at Navy. “It’s its own entity. It’s not as big as Florida and Florida State. But to us, it’s as big as you can get.”

This alternate universe of college football was founded in 1934 as the Eastern 150-pound Football League by University of Pennsylvania President Thomas Sovereign Gates, who wanted to assure smaller students a chance to compete. The weight limit has risen gradually — the latest jump was from 159 pounds to 165 in 1996 — but the spirit remains the same.

The lightweight league has produced some heavyweight alums, including Jimmy Carter (Navy, 1946), Mr. Rumsfeld (Princeton, 1954) and George Allen, who began his coaching career in 1947 as an assistant on the now-disbanded Michigan 150-pound team and later became coach of the Washington Redskins.

“They come here for academics,” said Bill Wagner, in his 34th season of coaching the Penn Quakers. “The icing on the cake is if you are 165 pounds two days before a game, you can play a varsity sport that has been around since before World War II.”

The original Eastern 150-pound Football League had seven members but now is down to five: founding members Penn, Princeton and Cornell, plus Army and Navy. The league changed its name in 1996, including the word “sprint” to emphasize speed over size. It has run continuously, though mostly in obscurity, for 70 years except for three seasons during World War II.

“I didn’t even know it existed,” said Midshipmen coach Jerome Rizzo, a Marine Corps major who thought he was being kidded when he was asked to coach Navy before last season. “Now that I have seen it, I think it’s great. Kids are getting the chance to play football that don’t have the size to play anywhere else.”

The Mids are the fat cats of the weight-watchers division. The two-time defending CSFL champions posted a 7-0 record last season and outscored their opponents 297-41. Navy opened this season with a 48-13 rout of Johns Hopkins’ junior varsity, a traditional team that includes linemen who weigh more than 275 pounds.

The crowd at intimate Rip Miller Field for the Hopkins game Sunday was typical for the CSFL — about 400 people, mostly family and friends with a few infants in strollers. Uniformed Midshipmen sat in one section, and about a dozen would run out and do push-ups beyond an end zone each time the academy scored.

Story Continues →