Philster043

I don't sense that any of the coaches want to go anywhere else.

I used to joke with Andrew Clement about how many brothers he had left after I found out about Caleb. And with the Smiths I was always like "I thought that kid had graduated" not realizing it was a different brother with the name SMITH on the back of their jersey. It's really quite funny how many of these brothers just happen to come right after each other and contribute greatly to keeping the winning tradition going.

I think I am gonna have to take my previous post about the '98 line back. This has bothered me for a while. First, I accidentally offended somebody from my own class with my original post (before editing it) by referring to the "smarts" of the '98 line (from my own class) as opposed to latter lines, and I do regret that. I was truly not trying to insult anybody's intelligence in that post and rather I was just trying to compliment the latter lines for being as successful as the '98 line despite obviously not being as big and talented. I consider at least three of these linemen very good friends of mine and I did not mean to insult them at all. And I've come to a conclusion lately: as long as they all learned the proper knowledge of blocking techniques and stay mistake-free - and there is no doubt Coach Ellis is fantastic at implementing these critical skills, I think the world of this man - it is virtually impossible to say this kid "is better" than another kid from these MHS lines. All of them were capable of mistakes but they all had remarkable accomplishments instead, and that's what counts the most. They ended up all being All-Stars. Having discussed Vol football players, Titans and Colts players over the years on various forums and with people - mostly players who would never really see my own opinions (though you never know!) - I didn't usually worry about them getting offended by my own posts. When I started posting here again at CoachT.com out of boredom lately, I've been posting about these kids in the same fashion lately and forgetting in the process that they're all kids who could be reading these posts and getting offended. I should have known better; I knew better when I was doing a website on Maryville football for two years. For some reason here I just keep forgetting, though. I could slap myself. In any case, I'm not sure this thread is very proper. In my honest opinion anyway, many, many of the players on the MHS teams I've watched play has been absolutely terrific. That includes, of course, the '98 line, with which I've had the honor of actually playing with on the same team for a couple of years. But there are even players who did not win any championships - they deserve credit for trying as well, for going out there, and just trying their darnedest to contribute to the team. For this reason actually I've always looked up to the '96 and '97 seniors, despite the fact that they never won a state championship. The '96 team was actually the last team at MHS that didn't make the playoffs, but I always looked up to these seniors - for example, Jammy Everett, Josh Gourley and Will Curtiss - because they were still terrific at what they did, and it didn't come without hard work. I admired these people. Ditto for David Sweetland and Andrew Healy, who at least led the charge to our first state championship appearance in 20 years. But that not only applies to MHS players but football players everywhere - because some players sometimes had far more to overcome - lack of talent, lack of ability, lack of size, sometimes lack of winning tradition, fan support, incompetent coaches, rough backgrounds, and so on. I have a lot of respect for players who try to do their best regardless, like the players at Maplewood this year. With that said, I think I'm going to refrain from comparing players anymore on these forums and my apologies to anybody else who I might have offended here.

They do, but that's the unfortunate thing about ALL-TIME teams... not enough space for everybody. Otherwise I definitely would have put up Brock and McCord as running backs too. Well, if you think so... you've watched a lot more teams than I did, but I always thought Ryan Maples and David Sweetland were better corners. I'll never forget that blur of a interception Sweetland had in the WB game in '97.

Concerning the transfer thing, I'm not surprised MHS has kids coming there every year. When you've nearly won 11 in 11 state championships, do you REALLY have to recruit? /wink.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=";)" border="0" alt="wink.gif" /> "Build it, and they will come..." Anyway, but the majority of our players have been local-grown, heh.

No disrespect to small schools or anything but I think I would always try to build 5A schools if I could, too. I went to some 2A games this year - Cumberland Gap plays at 2A, and I live close to there - and I felt so terrible for a lot of 2A teams that they played. They seemed so hopelessly outnumbered. Of course it's a different story when they finally get into the playoffs, but still. And I wish sometimes that Alcoa would be a bigger school than a 2A school as well. They probably could beat most 5A and 4A teams in the state, but they have such a small stadium (though it's been added on to recently) and school.

Don't forget a good OL.

That's great. But it's somewhat funny too. Imagine if Alcoa didn't have to play Maryville the last 4 years. They probably would have gone 60-0 as well. Imagine two teams from Blount County going 60-0. That would be crazy. I didn't know there was a team with a current winning streak even longer than we had (South Panola).

I think it's more awesome for the Maryville senior class personally that they did go 15-0 this year rather than going 60-0 while mostly being on the sidelines for that stretch. Most did contribute towards the last 30 wins at least. But you also have to credit the senior classes of the past few years as well for our seniors to have gone 15-0 this year - the ridiculous success of the seniors and juniors in '04, '05 and '06 that allowed so many of these seniors this year to gain experience in the second halfs of these games. This is actually the first year where I don't think George Quarles could quite get his back-ups into the game so often for them to gain some experience. I don't think that bodes well for the next year at least. So if next year's seniors don't go 15-0, we actually could blame this year's senior class for that. Not saying that we should, but we could. Actually, it's probably better to blame it on the amount of injuries we had this year. Nothing they really can do about that. I remember using to always complain when our starters started going out in the third quarter, sometimes even the second quarter, I would say that Quarles was calling off the dogs too soon a lot of times, but it's really paid off dividends for a long time now and I sort of feel silly about complaining about it now. I was actually looking for us to be able to get more players on the field this year.

It really is hard to choose between all the linemen from the last decade. They've all been very good, so you sort of almost have to go for who all were the most able to just knock people off the ball every single play. The '98 line (Matt Sharp, Nick Black, Issac Simerly, Chuck Prugh and James Richards) is still the best line overall in terms of size and talent that we've had in that decade, but they might not have been the most experienced (at least before four of them went to college and played ball). There's been lines since that had less to work with and yet did great. The line from '00 to '02 for example played a whole lot more HS games than the '98 line, and they had less size and strength than the '98 line and most of the lines around them - the Powell line at the time for example - so they had to make up for it by knowing their stuff. I think the same applies to the linemen from '03 to '06. But at the same time, the '98 line was no slouch in the department either. Only Coach David Ellis really knows who his best linemen has been, but he's probably not going to tell us his top 5. I'll bet it would be a very surprising top 5 though.

No clue on who we will be able to replace all our departing stars with next year, but this has happened before about four times where everybody is wondering about a lot of positions during the offseason and Maryville still seems to get it done anyway. Maybe it's the confidence they get after beating Alcoa in the first game nearly every year. But I do have to say, this might be the first time since 2000 that I think we're going to have so many question marks everywhere. Of course that 2000 team went 0-4 to start the season and then finished 11-4 and won state anyway, went 14-1 in '01 and 15-0 in '02. It's going to be real tough for us to play Alcoa in the first game next year because they return so many starters, so the coaches do have their work cut out for them this offseason if they want to win that game. It'll be interesting to see what all they do.

Hehe, I see. I didn't know you were joking... I mean, Heritage really could have been forgotten of late. sammy, that's really a toughie... For example, how can you really choose between Brent Burnette and Randall Cobb for quarterback anyway? These two are obviously the best two quarterbacks from Blount County in the last 4 years but they're so different. It really depends on what you want... I guess I'd have to say, though, Alcoa probably should sweep the running back category - Chris Shiverdecker and Dustin Lindsey, after all... Tyler Maples for one of the WR spots, at least, Kyrus Lanxter at the other. It's a tough choice between Brandon Warren and Aaron Douglas for the TE spot though... Sorry to say I really didn't pay attention to the WB teams of late, so I guess I might as well just leave it at that.

It's indeed a remarkable feat. A little luck here and there (the closest they've flirted with defeat was, I think, that regular season Central game last year - still can't believe Zach Helton threw that interception) but definitely mostly hard work that got the job done. By the way, if somebody would be willing to help me figure this out, what was Brent Burnette's overall career passing statistics? I'm trying to figure out whether he is now the Rebels' career passing leader or not, because I only have his statistics from the regular seasons of '05 and '06. 2005 Regular Season - Brent Burnette - 32-53 for 625 yards, 9 TDs, 3 INTs 2006 Regular Season - Brent Burnette - 63-86 for 1,243 yards, 11 TDs, 2 INTs 2007 - Brent Burnette - ??-?? for 3,521 yards, 38 TDs, ? INTs 2005-2007: ??-?? for ????, ?? TDs I know Cade Thompson was No. 1: 374-641 for 5,668 yards, 62 TDs. But I bet Brent's thrown for more yards in the 2005 and 2006 playoffs so he should be at least a close second, right? EDIT: Somebody told me Brent did break Cade's passing yardage and TD records though he didn't have the specific statistics. Unbelievable considering Burnette only really had one full season of starts compared to how many starts Cade Thompson had over three years. Though I guess Cade did have to sit out the 4th quarter of most games and had a good running game to complement his game for the most part, and Brent didn't, but still, good going Brent.

We've had pretty good kickers too in the last 3-4 years (this year was the first time I can remember that we didn't have any).

Actually, there's four. But I doubt William Blount and Heritage has the athletes to match up with Alcoa either.

Alcoa has probably had far more talented athletes than Maryville in the past 3-4 years, so if you're talking talent, I'd probably let an Alcoa fan answer this one. Maryville's best athlete in the last 4 years though has definitely been Tyler Maples.

Flash Simpson and Solomon, good posts and I agree with your analysis. It really was a very nice game. Maryville is not a perfect team by any means, but they do usually make less mistakes than the other team. For most of the game Maplewood did much, much better than I thought they would in staying away from the penalties and making all the tough catches and running hard. They also were very quick on defense. That helped them to a 14-13 score (for a while there I thought that missed PAT might haunt them.) But once Maryville gets a bit of a gap in the score, it's usually over. After halftime Maplewood succeeded in stopping Maryville and avoiding this for a longer while, but they lost the game when Maryville got the score up to 28-13. That's why I said the double pass trick play was the backbreaker. I knew GQ was going to use a trick play somewhere in the game, it was actually kind of one of the more fun things while watching the game - "Is this the play he does it? No, just a run... Is this IT? Nope, a pass..." And sure enough, GQ does the surprise play when I started to least expect it, and I'm sure the Maplewood defense were led into a lull as well. Coach Quarles is just a master of the unexpected play. But when you read about Maryville's season overall, it's unbelievable that they had a 15-0 season considering they had two wide receivers on the offensive line and a guy from the DL who had never played OL before. So I think, not to knock GQ, but this is the year where Coach David Ellis needs to get his just credits. He could be a very good head coach for us if he wanted to be - he is the best OL coach in the state.

This is rather embarrassing for Independence. Guess they aren't quite as charmed a team as Ravenwood (another relatively new school that won it all a couple of years ago). Oh well, congrats to Smyrna. I remember when we (Maryville) had to play Smyrna twice in '95 and once in '96, that was a fun brief rivalry, although such a loooong trip over there...

I love football pics.

These kids were first-time participants though. Compared to Maryville, who had sent their seniors to three state championship games before this game. Not to mention the coaches having been there 8 out of the last 10 years now. But yeah, Maplewood have gone two times. I wouldn't be surprised if they came back next year, assuming they don't lose too many starters. They didn't seem to have a whole lot of players on the sidelines waiting in the wing.

I doubt George Quarles will leave MHS at least until his kids are grown up and off to college. This is a great place to raise kids, and GQ is still a relatively young guy. He'll probably get a lot of opportunities in another 20 years, and much better ones to boot. And anyway, as much of an offensive genius as GQ has been, he's not really the only reason behind Maryville's success the last 10 years. Offensive line guru David Ellis is as much responsible for that success, especially this year, and our defense has always relied on Coach Jim Gaylor as well. The three of them make a very, very good Maryville coaching staff, and they will probably continue the winning tradition when they all move up to 5A. Especially as Gaylor is pretty familiar with 5A schools if I'm not mistaken, as a former Clinton head coach (back when they were still in 5A and actually good). I wouldn't be too surprised if Maryville continues winning in 5A like they have been in 4A. Anybody remember when Maryville played defending 5A champion, Red Bank, who had Gerald Riggs Jr., in the 4A playoffs the following year? Everybody thought it would be a great game. It ended up being a lopsided win in Maryville's favor. Maryville will do just as well in 5A if they retain their coaching staff.

Yeah, I was very impressed with Maplewood all things considered, for a first-time participant in the championship game and playing Maryville for the first time, they looked very good for most of the game. All these games with Hillsboro over the last three years must have paid off for them in the way of experience. It actually took a George Quarles trick play (what else?) to finally break the camel's back. Congratulations to Maryville, the truck just keeps on rolling. 4th in a row and 60 in a row, and this was probably the toughest season for Maryville since 2000, so outstanding coaching job as well. Hopefully we can reload and keep it going in 2008, we're losing quite a few players. But it's been an amazing dynasty.

Well, I have to say Maplewood is a more worthy opponent than I expected. Big and fast. And skilled... and determined, which I guess is about what I'd expect considering their background of the last three years. I can see why Hillsboro and Henry County lost to them (and they must have been pretty good themselves to only lose by 1 each, too.) Very good game so far.

Just wondering about these quarterbacks you mentioned REBELRON: did they ever really anything like the passing numbers that our QBs in the last 10 years (McCray, Phillips, Giles, Thompson, Burnette) have been? Wasn't Maryville more of a running team in the 70's and 80's before Quarles came along?

I have this to say about Maplewood: wow, what a story. I have to say I admire Coach Ralph Thompson for turning that program around, can't have been easy at all. While I don't think Maplewood has a chance against Maryville, I think they were successful just getting to the championship with that kind of adversity.