SPORTS

SHIELDS: Coaching legends talk about today’s football

Brandon Shields
bjshields@jacksonsun.com

REAGAN – Johnny Majors, Gene Stallings and Jerry Stovall have been out of the football coaching game for the better part of two decades, but they all still enjoy the game and watch it.

The three were in Scotts Hill Saturday night for Night with Legends.

Majors, who played and coached at Tennessee, has been in touch with current Vols coach Butch Jones. While he may not be as enthusiastic as a lot of the Big Orange fans, Majors does see an opportunity for improvement for the team.

“They’re going to be better,” Majors said. “They were pretty average last year, but they were good by the end of the year. That’s a good way to end up.

“They should have a better record because they’ve recruited extremely well and those players are maturing every year. They have a good group of freshmen coming up. I don’t know their record, but they should definitely be better.”

Majors even pointed out a tough early test for the Vols they might compete better against than they did last year.

“Oklahoma will be weaker, but they will still be good,” Majors said.

Stallings said he doubted if he or his legendary coach at Texas A&M, Paul Bryant, could be coaches in 2015 because society as a whole is so different from what it was when they coached. He also gave his thoughts on the college football playoff, which began in NCAA FBS this past year.

“First of all, I don’t think they should have a playoff because the season is long enough already,” Stallings said. “We forget that these kids are here to get an education, and it’s hard to do that if you’re playing a bunch of playoff games and having exams at the same time.

“But Ohio State bailed them out last year. They need to have an eight-team playoff. Put your five big conference champions in there with three at-large teams, because four is not enough. That’s what they need to do if they have a playoff, but I’d rather them not have a playoff.”

Each of these coaches learned under some of the legendary names in the game before winning national championships themselves, so they probably know what they’re talking about when it comes to football. It might be good for fans and the NCAA to take what they say into account heading into this year and the coming seasons as FBS football progresses.

Middleton jamboree

There was an incorrect statement in a notebook this week when we highlighted the jamboree schedule. We said Middleton wouldn’t be participating in a jamboree, but that’s incorrect.

The Tigers recently set up a scrimmage with Fayette Academy for Aug. 13, which is the night before everybody else’s jamboree in rural West Tennessee.

This is a good matchup for the Tigers as their head coach, Craig Harris, wanted to put the Vikings on the Tigers’ schedule originally, but the scheduling snafus that happened with adding two teams to their Memphis-heavy region meant dropping non-region games. They didn’t know Woodstock and W.E.B. Dubois weren’t fielding teams until after Fayette Academy had filled its schedule already.

“We wanted to play them because it was a good rivalry for us – schools of similar size close to each other,” Harris said. “But we couldn’t get it to work out.

“I’m glad to be playing them like this at least.”

Brandon Shields is the high school sports columnist for The Jackson Sun. Contact him at 425-9751 or at bjshields@jacksonsun.com. Follow him on Twitter @JSEditorBrandon or on Instagram at jacksonsunsports.