Cutting football down to size

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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.