ALTOONA, Pa. -- We have high school football playoffs starting tonight around the state, and the next few weeks will be a glorious time in the lives of young people who will be making lifetime memories.
One of the biggest things you'll notice about high school sports sometimes, however, is the gigantic discrepancy in talent level between teams in a lot of different sports. Blowouts and even ridiculous blowouts can be the norm in some situations, because one team is just tremendous, while the other team might be really, really bad.
It's in those situations where true sportsmanship is revealed.
And I don't ever recall in my lifetime a more pathetic display of sportsmanship than something I saw that happened last week in a high school football game in California.
The final score: Inglewood 106, Morningside 0.
It was 59-0 after the first quarter. That's the most ridiculous first-quarter score you'll ever see, and at that point, everyone knew the game was already over.
But Inglewood's coach, Mil'Von James, decided to just keep pouring it on and on and on. His star quarterback, Justyn Martin, who's heading to UCLA, threw 13 touchdown passes, two shy of the national record set 100 years ago. They just kept throwing and throwing and throwing.
There were a lot of bad parts. They could have implemented the running clock mercy rule at any point after the first quarter, but James said no. Then after his team scored a late touchdown, the coach called for a 2-point conversion to make the final 106-0.
Who does that kind of thing? Any of it?
It's absolutely despicable.
The coach of the other team called it a "classless move."
Just call off the dogs, man. Let the clock run, keep the ball on the ground and get the game over with. What possible reason could a coach have for running the score up that badly, aside from being completely classless and clueless and oblivious to sportsmanship?
Should the coach be fired? My initial reaction is yes, but honestly, I don't know enough about him or his background or what good he may have done for young people in other situations. He reportedly was fired from his last high school head coaching job for using ineligible players.
My thinking is you shouldn't have someone coaching young people who thinks that it's a good idea to beat a team 106-0 while continuing to throw the ball to pad stats and going for 2 to set the final score.
Even Dick Vitale weighed in on the story and called for the coach to be fired.
How can the Coaching staff of INGLEWOOD HS California feel good about themselves ?They beat MORNINGSIDE HS 106-0.Their QB threw for 13 TD’s & while up 104-0 THEY GO FOR 2 ! SICKENING & a DISGRACE to the Title of COACH! Congrats on teaching good sportsmanship .U SHOULD BE FIRED!
— Dick Vitale (@DickieV) October 31, 2021
Here's the apology statement released by the winning school's principal:
“We did not conduct ourselves with sportsmanship and integrity and the final score was unacceptable,’’ Inglewood High principal Debra Tate wrote in a statement released Tuesday. “Coach James has also offered his apologies to the Morningside High School football program and the larger school community. …
“Our administration will work with our coaches to ensure that these mistakes are not repeated in the future, and that the Inglewood High School program conducts itself with the highest level of sportsmanship and integrity going forward.’’
Last Friday night, former DK Pittsburgh Sports writer Audrey Snyder, now with The Athletic, traveled to cover Penn State quarterback commit Drew Allar play a high school game and wrote this story. Allar is the No. 1 quarterback prospect in the country, and Snyder tweeted out this during the second quarter of his game:
That’s the night for Allar with 6:44 left in the 2nd qtr. Medina up 40-0.
— Audrey Snyder (@audsnyder4) October 30, 2021
That's how you do it right there. It was 40-0 already, and rather than continue to pummel the opponent, Allar's coach pulled him midway through the second quarter. Allar apparently has been pulled very early in many games after the score got out of hand quickly.
I joked with Audrey in the press box at Ohio State last Saturday about how, if the score is 40-0 midway through the second quarter, it gets to be hard to distinguish if the star quarterback is really just that good, or if the other team is that bad.
That's how things sometimes go in high school sports. Some teams really are that good, and some teams really are that bad. You'll see it in high school girls basketball more than any other sport, with final scores sometimes like 82-6 or 77-3 or whatever.
There was this 102-0 girls game four years ago in Montana. And one of the most famous blowouts ever came when superstar Lisa Leslie scored 101 points in a single half (only 16 minutes!) back in 1990. She was going for the national record of 105, but the other team wouldn't take the court for the second half, so the final score was 102-24.
Leslie obviously was awesome, but that kind of record says more about sportsmanship than it does one player's individual talent. The same goes with the Inglewood quarterback who threw 13 touchdown passes in the 106-0 game.
How's this for irony? Leslie played at Morningside High School, which was the same school that got beat last week 106-0. That's just karma pulling an all-time troll job, right?
Anyway, it would be great if all high school coaches were above all this and could indeed call off the dogs when games get completely out of hand. And 99.9 percent of them do in those situations.
There's no lesson in continuing to embarrass the opponent. And a coach whose judgment is so poor that he thinks it's a good idea to beat a team 106-0 probably shouldn't be allowed to coach high school kids any longer.
