Daly was modesty itself in those days as he has been ever since, even when equipped with the yellow jacket and peacock feather of the head coach.  As player and as coach and often as the two combined, Daly’s connection with West Point football covered eight years, in the course of which he never played on or coached a losing team.  His record against the Navy alone is seven victories and one tie, 146 points to 33.  His final year’s coaching was done in 1915.  From West Point he was sent to Hawaii, whence he writes me, as follows: 

“There are certain episodes in the game that have always been of particular interest to me, such as Ely’s game playing with broken ribs in the Harvard-Yale game of 1898; Charlie de Saulles’ great playing with a sprained ankle in the Yale-Princeton game of the same year; the tackling of Bunker by Long of the Navy in the Army-Navy game of 1902—­the hardest tackle I have ever seen; and the daring quarterback work of Johnny Cutler in the Harvard-Dartmouth 1908 game, when he snatched victory from defeat in the last few minutes of play.”

Undoubtedly Daly’s deep study of strategy and tactics as used in warfare had a great deal to do with his continued ascendency as a coach.  Writing to Herbert Reed, one of the pencil and paper football men, with whom he had had many a long argument over the generalship of the game, he said in part: 

“Football within the limitations of the rules and sportsmanship is a war game.  Either by force or by deception it advances through the opposition to the goal line, which might be considered the capital of the enemy.”

It was in Daly’s first year that a huge Southerner, with a pleasant drawl, turned up in the plebe class.  It was a foregone conclusion almost on sight that Ernest, better known to football men throughout the country as Pot Graves, would make the Eleven.  He not only played the game almost flawlessly from the start, but he made so thorough a study of line play in general that his system, even down to the most intimate details of face to face coaching filed away for all time in that secret library of football methods at West Point, has come to be known as Graves’ Bible.

Daly, still with that ineradicable love for his own Alma Mater, lent a page or two from this tome to Harvard, and even the author appeared in person on Soldiers’ Field.  The manner in which Graves made personal demonstration of his teachings will not soon be forgotten by the Harvard men who had to face Pot Graves.

Graves has always believed in the force mentioned in Daly’s few lines quoted above on the subject of military methods as applied to football.  While always declaring that the gridiron was no place for a fist fight, he always maintained that stalwarts should be allowed to fight it out with as little interference by rule as possible.  As a matter of fact, Graves was badly injured in a game with Yale, and for a long time afterwards hobbled around with a troublesome knee.  He knew the man who did it, but would never tell his name, and he contents himself with saying “I have no ill will—­he got me first.  If he hadn’t I would have got him.”