TrenchWarrior

I actually coached at Jellico years ago and we played against Sunbright. Jellico honestly has too many problems to list. If it could screw up a HS football program, Jellico probably has to deal with it. There's no money for anything there, many kids struggle to survive in horrible poverty, kids are all spread out with unreliable busses to get them to school, and it's just plain hard to literally get kids there, especially for July and early August camp before school starts and no busses run. A lot of times, kids have very legit reasons for not being at practice... but the others see that and take advantage. It's very much a "learned helplessness" thing with the kids thinking that 1 win a year is good enough, but the community and school district don't do them any favors with the politics. The whole situation is just toxic for building anything positive. As for Sunbright... the school, facility, and community is beautiful, but they're just... so... small. They're one of the smallest schools with a football team in the entire state, with enrollment around 174 when we played them (1A goes up to enrollments of around 400). That means there's only about 70-80 boys in the entire school, so it's hard to build any kind of team with depth (or even 11 dependable starters). When I coached against them, they had a good coach from the community who basically installed middle school level schemes and coached them hard on fundamentals. They weren't great, but they didn't beat themselves and made other teams work for it. Another problem that plagued all the Morgan County schools at that time was their inability to keep good coaches around or get assistants into the system. Teaching jobs are scarce and the system used NOTHING towards insurance, meaning you'd accept a job for $40k a year and then pay $800-$1000 a MONTH for insurance, so many people just can't afford to coach there and support themselves and their families.

I don't think you necessarily *have* to have a D1 QB and WRs, but it certainly helps. You need to be able to develop WRs. That's mostly about technique and coaching with the proper drills and reps in practice. There's a lot more to it than just putting some athletic kid out there and playing pitch and catch. Generally, while HS WRs are coached better now than they used to be 10-15 years ago, a lot of schools still don't do a good job of developing them. As for QBs... you can throw a ton with a "pretty good" HS QB, but you need to play to his strengths and within his limits. A typical HS QB is not going to be dropping Hendon Hooker-style dimes 40 yards downfield to the opposite sideline. He's going to need to throw a bunch of high-percentage screens and safe dinks/dunks if you want to move the ball primarily through the air. That gets a lot harder against the good teams you have to beat on the way to a championship. Personally, I'd rather play my best players at RB and QB so I can make sure they have the ball in their hands 20+ times in big games, rather than putting them at WR where they might be lucky to touch the ball 3-4 times.

As someone who has coached HS ball for a decade now, I completely agree with you. However, I'll point out that a lot of these teams trying to throw the ball all over the field in HS are doing it for reasons other than winning. A lot of coaches feel a ton of pressure from parents (and, by extension, school administration) to put the ball in the air. WRs' parents don't like to watch their kids block or ride the bench all night. A lot of coaches also fear that kids won't come out to play in "old school" offenses now, though I personally find that to be false. Then you have coaches who take over programs with lousy weight programs who feel their OL are just incapable of run blocking the opponents. When West won state a few years back running the veer, parents blamed the offense for "holding the team back" and ran off their coach as soon as they took home the gold ball. You just can't please some people and the coaches in the stands will always think they know more than the coaches on the field. That's not to say you can't win by throwing a ton in HS. If you have a very good QB or if you're just really good at coaching and developing QBs and WRs (largely by putting them in favorable spots and trying to limit/eliminate tough and dangerous throws), and at calling that offense so you have answers to heavy blitzes or 3 man rushes, you can usually make it work well enough to win... but winning it all with that offense is usually dependent upon who you've got at QB. Hampton made it to state last year by just pounding the rock out of the Power I when they would have won maybe 3 games running some "grip it and rip it" type of spread offense... but then they got shredded by a 5* Alabama recruit QB and his D1 receivers slinging it all over the field in the actual title game.

The pandemic and the fallout from it destroyed HS football in a lot of places where it was already in trouble. This year alone, about 1/3 of all the head coaching jobs in the state turned over, and that’s on top of an insanely high number in 2020 and 2021 Not all of those schools put much effort into getting quality replacements in place. Many schools are struggling with numbers and with getting and keeping decent assistant coaches now. Boone and Hampton both had strong athletic cultures and supportive administrations/communities in place already, so they’ve weathered the storm nicely. Jenkins has been the longest tenured head coach in the state for about 7 years now. Lunsford at Hampton is only around 30 years old, but he’s already surprisingly high on that list himself because of all the turnover.

School record is something like 369 by Tylee Henry in '97.

The TSSAA hasn't even announced if they're going to keep the 6 class system with the Super 32 or what they're going to next year. Volunteer is a large 4A school with about 1050ish kids year in and year out. The cutoff for 5A last time was about 1100. If it's 6 even classes, which has been discussed, they'll be 5A and competing against Boone, TN High, and pretty much the entire old Big 8, minus D-B and Science Hill. If they stay Super 32, they'll probably be a big 4A again.

It's a shame. That's getting to be what it's like in more and more places. It used to be that your studs might be All Conference or even All State in 2-3 sports. Now they don't even try because every sport has a yearlong grind. In football you have to lift and train year round to be in game shape, but I don't understand why kids can't do that while they're also playing basketball and baseball. Actually, I do, but AAU and traveling teams are B.S. and they're ruining youth athletics at all levels.

I meant they'll be running a pro-style offense, not that they'll be scoring as if they're an NFL team. Again, give them time. It's a very young group with some coaches who are doing the right things to build the program up, but they have a tough road to hoe the next year. Rome wasn't built in a day and hopefully they can surprise some people this year, but the real payoff might not be for another year or two.

He did, but then he did something stupid with his state tests in the classroom and the administration canned him over it instead of giving him some a reprimand and letting him stay. They're now on their 4th coach in the 2 years since he was fired.

They're still very young. The numbers look good, they made some great gains in the offseason program, and there's enthusiasm, which nice to see, but they are SO YOUNG. Most of the talent is in the underclasses, especially the rising sophomores. In another year or two, they'll be good, but this is still a rebuilding program with a tough schedule. The team will be better this year, but the record might not show it. People need to give them time. That said, they have a good coaching staff and a couple of stud athletes--the problem is that Maryville and the other schools just have more of them. Last year they were limited by a couple of coaches who didn't take care of their responsibilities like they should have. Those guys are gone now.

Also... apologies for hijacking this thread. I'm a coach between football jobs right now after some weird politics at my last stop, so all that itching to talk ball's come out. lol. Thank you all for humoring me.

I guess the OP's original question was "Why are HS coaches so stupid? Why can't they just let kids play like they did at the lower levels?" Well... sometimes a kid matures early and is the biggest and fastest kid on the field in 8th grade and just tears it up as a RB, but when he gets to HS he's not even in the top half of the team and they want him on the field, so they try to fit him somewhere else. Or maybe they need him to fill in somewhere else because that's where he can best help the team right now. Or maybe the other kids just catch up with him and the stuff that he could do so well against awkward middle schoolers and little leaguers just doesn't fly against 17 and 18 year old young men. Maybe that 6'1" Tim Duncan with the early growth spurt from the MS team who was 3" taller than everyone else on the court just can't play that same style of basketball against 6'7" post players in HS. Ever think of that? Also, position switching happens at all levels. Have you ever seen the amount of HS QBs who play DB, WR, or even TE/DE at the next level? How about the linemen who switch sides of the ball or all the RBs who become LBs? It happens all the time. When I played in HS, we had a big athletic kid come out to play football his junior year. Tried him at RB but he was soft as a kitten. He was very contact shy. After spring ball and a week of practice, the coaches decided to try him at LB. He said "Coach, I try to avoid contact!" and whined, but they stuck him there anyway. After about 5 plays of practice, he made a big hit and was hooked. He went on to be our conference DPOY that year, was All-State 2x, and got a D1 scholarship. He was no longer contact shy. Maybe they're not so stupid.

The best passing offenses in all of FBS were Washington St., Western Kentucky, East Carolina, and Baylor last year. They had a combined 30-21 record with Washington State going 3-9. Of the final 4, Oregon was the highest rated one at #10, followed by FSU at #14, Alabama at #29, and Ohio State was #52 overall out of 128 teams. Rushing wise, Georgia Southern, Georgia Tech, Navy, and Wisconsin were the top 4 and had a combined record of 39-14 (the top 3 were all triple option teams) and all had winning seasons. Of the final 4, Ohio State came in at #9, followed by Oregon at #22, Alabama at #37, and Florida State was way down at #98. In terms of defense (we'll go by points per game, since that's all that really matters), the top 4 teams in the nation were Ole Miss, Stanford, Clemson, and Temple, with records of a combined 33-18. Temple had the worst record, at 6-6. Of the final 4, Alabama was #6, Ohio State was #26, Oregon was #30, and FSU was #49.

Multiple formations work fine as long as the team's not doing radically different stuff. The teams who do this well recycle a lot of terminology and blocking. After a while, as a coach you realize that the offenses out there are about more than formations and the plays. They playcalling is actually the easiest part of coaching if you know what makes your system really work. What really makes an offense work is how it's blocked and how it's all packaged together so you have answers to how teams are going to defend you. Look at the old Wing-T. First off, it's a really simple system for blocking--EVERYTHING is block down and kick out up front, so kids get TONS of work on that in practice every day (or they used to, before they were limited to 90 min. of "contact" in a week). With that blocking, the Wing-T teams want to run the old Buck Sweep. They have the trap, the waggle, and the counter play(s) in there to hurt you when your guys are doing stuff that takes Buck Sweep away so they can't stop it all without just overloading you in certain spots. Then they have the Belly Iso, Belly Option, and Belly Counter in there to hit the weakside of the formation so you can't just overload those spots with people. They have answers. So when they burn you with those answers a few times and you back off... then they can run the Buck Sweep play they wanted to run all along. That's what an offense is all about. The good spread teams have answers, too. The good I formation teams have their answers. Etc. The key at the HS level is to teach it in a way that the kids can remember and get really good at doing against whatever they see on Friday night. Fulton is so good because they don't try to put a bunch of different offenses together--their stuff has a ton of carry over from one play to the next. They just tell the kids to stand in a different spot before the snap or get the ball to a different guy when they do the things they normally do, anyway. It looks like they're doing a lot of different things, when really it's the same old stuff they know how to do in their sleep, just with a little tweak to it. That's smart coaching.

A bunch of small schools run Wing-T stuff successfully at the next level. It's just not what you see in the SEC or Big 12. That offense has evolved quite a bit since the 90s. There's a new version of the Wing-T now. That jet sweep play that every college runs to their fast WRs? That was a Wing-T idea. Actually there's a ton of Wing-T influence in what Auburn, Ohio State, Mississippi State, and Stanford do if you look at the blocking and their use of misdirection and how the offense is actually structured. They don't use the old formations, but the soul of it's still there. It's like the old Wing-T was a '65 Mustang with a 4 speed and a 289 and now they're cruising around in a 2014 model with a 5.0 and a 6 speed automatic that an old timer wouldn't even recognize.