ASCHAFFENBURG — Benny Friedman walked off the playing field at the 18th Inf's new athletic plant yesterday after giving Vanguard backfield star Barry Ontai some passing pointers and remarked:

"Fielding Yost wrapped up the soundest advice I've ever heard for playing football in three simple rules:

"1 — Look over the defense.

"2 — Play for position.

"3 — Barnum was right."

Friedman, an integral part of the U.S. football scene since the mid-twenties when he quarterbacked great Yost-coached Michigan grid machines as an all-time All America passing whiz, smiled patiently at our puzzlement over "Barnum was right."

"Yost, the best coach I've ever known ," said Friedman, "figured like P. T. Barnum — there's a fool born every minute. 'When you get on the field,' Yost used to say, 'look for them. That's the way you score touchdowns — the easy way.'"

"That's one of the things I'm going to try to get across while I'm holding football clinics here for the 1st Division. A player doesn't have to be bigger and rougher than his opponent. But he must have well-grounded habits of technique, he must look for tipoffs from the other side and he must know how to take advantage of them.

"Too much of modern football is tagging and pulling and pushing. I want to teach a boy how to hit hard and clean and get through."

Friedman, looking fit with a generous Florida tan and extremely trim at 188 pounds — only five morn than he weighed in his senior year at Ann Arbor in 1926 — recalled that Yost taught his teams to think in terms of touchdowns instead of first downs.

He illustrated by telling about Michigan's second game against Minnesota in his senior year.

"We played' Minnesota twice that year by agreement between Yost and Doe Spear to round out the schedule. We won the first at Ann Arbor in early October and then went to Minneapolis to play the Saturday before Thanksgiving.

"Minnesota made 19 first downs. We made only three. We won, 7-6, How? They tried eight passes. We knocked down one and intercepted the other seven."

Before that game, incidentally, Friedman, who was already nationally known as Yost's All America passing quarterback with All America end Benny Oosterbaan as his receiver, worried himself down to 169 pounds. After the battle, played in six inches of snow, Friedman weighed 160.

He got into his first varsity game as a sophomore halfback in 1924 in the last five minutes of the famous clash in which Red Grange, the Galloping Ghost, scored four touchdowns in the first four minutes as Illinois slaughtered Michigan, 85-55.

The young halfback was a. starter against Wisconsin the following Saturday and from then until graduation played almost 60 minutes of every game.

Yost took over the team in 1925 and turned Friedman into a quarterback. That eleven, ranked as one of the greatest in gridiron history, marked the debut of the pass as a serious offensive weapon. The big reason for its success, of course, was the sensational Friedman-to-Oosterbaan combination that Red Byrne and other experts have rated as one of the greatest of all time.

Friedman made the major All America first strings in his junior and senior years. After graduation, he played pro ball for Cleveland in '27, for Detroit the following season and for the New York Giants in 1929-31, also coaching at Yale the latter two years,

After starring at Brooklyn two years, he took over the coaching reins at CCNY in 1934, staying there until he was commissioned in the Navy in 1941 He coached the Great Lakes team in 1942 and later served aboard an aircraft carrier in the Pacific.

Last year he became athletic director and head football coach at Brandeis University, the newly founded school at Waltham, Mass., which has had recent articles written about it in Post, Time and Newsweek magazines for its fresh approach to higher education.

Friedman's teams played a freshman schedule in football, basketball and baseball against such schools as Harvard, Boston University and Boston College and came through pretty well in spite of being: handicapped by the lack of a gym. This fall Brandeis embarks on its varsity football career, opening against New Hampshire and playing teams like Wayne and Bradley Tech.

Looking at the national picture, the Brandeis coach thought Notre Dame would bounce back with a strong contender after last year's reverses. He declined to crawl out on the limb of prediction in ranking this fall's big wheels.

Friedman will instruct at Aschaffenburg until Friday, move over to the 26th Inf at Bamberg, July 23-27, work with the 16th Inf at Furth, July 31-Aug. 3 and then wind up his EUCOM stint at Erlangen with the 1st Div Arty, Aug. 6-10. .

First Div officials in charge of Friedman's series here said they would like to repeat an open invitation to all Army and Air Force installations to send men to any of the clinics.