It wasn’t the first time I had heard such a score nor will be the last.  72-0, 69-3, 68-6.  Yes football scores that got out of hand.  Too many times the response is:

“Wow coach could you pile on little more?!”  Here are the people that usually believe the coach on the winning team just kept piling on.  He knew he had the better team and he wanted to prove it.

I am here to tell you that is not the case.  Wait stop, there could be a few coaches across the entire state that would do that, I can’t tell you who but  there could be a couple.

I have spent time around some really amazing programs including McCook, NE.  The Bison coach Jeff Gross is a Hays native and has built an absolute powerhouse in southwest Nebraska.  During a Saturday morning coaches show I was chatting with coach Gross about a particular score that looked bad.  Like 69-0 bad.  Ya it was one of those scores.  My question to coach Gross was point blank, “what do you do in those situations?”  McCook has enough football players they do not (or at least not at the time) took freshmen on the road as this game was.

Coach Gross pulled his starters at half time, playing exclusively sophomores with a couple of juniors to plug holes.  Coach Gross also ran dives up the middle for the rest of the night, hoping that the opposing team would take his kids down after just a few yards, eating up clock and keeping the score down.  The only problem is that the other team couldn’t make the tackles.  So the burden came back onto coach Gross.  How can he or any other coach for that matter tell his kids to “lie down?”  How can you tell kids that are chomping at the bit just to prove themselves and play under the Friday night lights to “take it easy?”

To simply put it…you can’t.  You can’t tell kids to fall back what may be their only shot.

I know coaches that have sent letters off to the team they just beat terribly on the previous Friday night explaining that they did try to stop the onslaught by certain play calling and pulling players out of the game.  I admire these coaches trying to explain to others in their profession that they did not want to or mean to embarrass them or their team.

So before you start chastising coaches for running up the score…take a minute to realize that the coach very well had done everything to control the score, but it simply got out of hand.