A high school football team in Eugene, Oregon, recently beat its archrival 63-0, which got the coach fired. Not the losing coach. The winner.
Good riddance.
Some context here: The winning team, Marist Catholic High, had just scored to go ahead 56-0 in the closing minutes of the first half. It then tried an onside kick in an effort to get the ball back quickly and score again. This approach is known by various terms, including “piling on” and “rubbing it in.” And others that I can’t print here.
The losing team, Cottage Grove High, recovered the kick. But an interception soon followed, and the winners scored again, producing the final 63-0 count. Final because, by “mutual consent,” the teams agreed not to play the second half.
I identify with those losers. Many, many years ago, as a high school sophomore, I played defense on a Moss Point football team that lost 68-6 to Biloxi. It could have been far worse. They scored on three of their first four offensive plays. Let that sink in. Four plays. 21-0.
The difference in the games – and it is significant – is that I don’t believe the Biloxi team or coach was piling on. They were the best team in the state and simply couldn’t help it.
As a sports writer put it in his account, Biloxi pulled its first team with four minutes left in the first quarter, but “there was no holding the score down.” He called us “outclassed.” We were. Biloxi scored 21 points in the fourth quarter, by which time I suspect some of the cheerleaders had suited up and joined in the action.
So yeah, I know a little about blowouts.
Accounts of the Oregon game and aftermath quickly spread through social media, as you might imagine. The comments show that most agreed with the firing, but not all. This one is typical of the hard core, presented word for word:
“It’s the defense’s job to stop the offense. If you can’t handle that, I’m sure they some kind of intramural sports for y’all.”
You should know that some amateur sports have what’s generally known as a “mercy rule,” which suspends a contest if the score gets too out of hand. But football, not so much.
On the college level, a Tennessee school, Cumberland College, was the victim of what NCAA.com calls “the biggest beat down in college football history,” a 222-0 battering by Georgia Tech in 1916.
But there’s some extenuating background to that. The Tech coach, the website states, suspected Cumberland of having used professional ringers – nonstudents – to win a baseball game 22-0 against Tech the previous year. (He also coached baseball.) Though Cumberland had discontinued football for 1916, it was committed to the Tech game, and so played it with a team “filled with fraternity brothers assembled by the team’s student manager.”
Twenty-four Tech touchdowns “took one or zero offensive plays. Tech had seven defensive touchdowns, six kick-return touchdowns and 11 touchdowns from one-play drives on offense.”
It’s not clear whether there was any particular bad blood in the Oregon high school game, other than the usual archrival animus. I’ve not seen any explanation from the fired coach, though I’m sure he has what he considers an excuse.
No matter, said the Marist principal, who wrote in an email to parents that “we determined that a change in leadership was necessary to reflect our school’s mission and values.”
Mission and values which, as a Catholic school, you would expect might include some measure of respect for the other team. As the Marist athletic director said, the coach’s conduct did not reflect “how we want to treat our opponents.”
So, as I said, good riddance. But I suspect the jettisoned coach might well file some sort of legal proceeding to contest the firing, and who knows what might come of that. I also fully expect he will be hired again to coach football somewhere else, considering his Marist team won a state championship two years ago.
Maybe the Titans will give him a call.
Joe Rogers is a former writer for The Tennessean and editor for The New York Times. He is retired and living in Nashville. He can be reached at jrogink@gmail.com.