Milan ranked as top football program
MILAN – Most small towns in rural West Tennessee enjoy their high school football.
But in Milan things are a little different.
No town reflects school pride like Milan as many business fronts and sidewalks will have a purple tint to them during the season, other than the ones who are permanently purple all year long.
It’s nothing out of the ordinary to drive on Hwy. 45 through town on a Friday and see hundreds of small signs drawn by the town’s elementary school children displayed on the side of a road in a line nearly as long as the line of people at the ticket booth an hour before kickoff that night at Johnnie Hale Stadium.
To say the people of Milan love their football program would be an understatement.
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“We’re not a college program, but sometimes it can feel like it,” said Jeff Morris, who’s been the head coach of the Bulldogs for 20 years and surpassed the 200-win career mark last season. “But fans like the ones we have are a big reason a lot of guys like me get into coaching and want to coach at a program like this one.
“When you have a fan base like ours, they expect to win. The reason they expect to win is because we have won and have a high standard.”
And the program has certainly maintained that high standard in Morris’ two decades at the helm. It started with state championships in two of his first years in charge.
Since 2008, there have been two years when the Bulldogs didn’t go to the state semifinals – one was in 2013 when they failed to make the playoffs and last season when Liberty eliminated them in the quarterfinals. Four of those six trips to the semifinals resulted in wins to go on to Cookeville.
That year in 2013 when they went 3-7 and missed the playoffs marked the only time since 1982 the Bulldogs didn’t make the postseason. But it was the first time since 1999 they ended their season with a victory as they beat Obion County in their regular season finale and had a small shot at making the playoffs if the right combination of teams had lost that night in the Z-Plan.
Not many schools have a history that compares with that of Milan either.
John Tucker retired from Humboldt as the winningest football coach in TSSAA history, but he got most of those victories leading the Bulldogs from 1969 through 1993. The program won two state championships in the 1970s and might’ve won more in the 1980s had they not matched up with the likes of Memphis University School and Brentwood Academy nearly every year in the state quarterfinals or semifinals.
A number of Bulldogs went on to play at the University of Tennessee. Earnest Fields and John Fisher earned their letters in Knoxville in the late 1980s as Tucker had a virtual football pipeline from Milan to Knoxville for a few years.
But for all of the players who went on to transition from the purple pride of Milan to the tradition of Vols football, none of them made it to the National Football League.
The honor of the first Bulldog alum to make it to pro football went to Avery Williamson, the 2009 All-West Tennessee Player of the Year who went on to become a productive player for the University of Kentucky. He was among the tackling leaders in the SEC while the Wildcats as a team struggled. He was chosen in the fifth round of the 2014 NFL Draft by the Tennessee Titans, for whom he’s been among the tackling leaders in his first two years in the league.
“Playing for Milan was good for me in preparing me for Kentucky and I think even beginning my preparation for being in the NFL,” Williamson said during an interview earlier this spring. “And the people there are great and came to Lexington to support me and come up to Nashville to support me there too.
“Milan football definitely stands out from everybody else, but I might be biased.”
Brandon Shields, 425-9751
About this series
This is the final installment in which Brandon Shields ranks the top five high school football programs in the Sun’s coverage area.
1. Milan
2. Peabody
3. Lexington
4. Adamsville
5. Huntingdon