MurvulHigh

As a side note the Furman game’s a home game for ETSU this year. First thing I thought of when I read about ETSU hiring Coach Quarles was how a big part of him going to Furman was to coach with Clay Hendrix and how they were roommates when they were young and all that. It’ll be quite a day for both of them to be on opposite sidelines now. Might well be worth a trip up I-81 if UT’s not at home that week.

Congrats to Oakland, go win it all. I couldn’t be any prouder of the Rebels, and what they do year in and year out. The consistent quality over, seriously, decades now is simply unreal. For whoever it was who asked if the result of this game was due to Quarles being gone, I don’t know if you were legitimately wondering but it’s a simple answer for anyone who actually follows Tennessee football, and Maryville in particular. No. Derek Hunt is our coach and he’s, and seriously think about this, he’s in his early 30s and has state titles of his own. How many wins do you think he’s going to wind up with when all’s said and done? Maryville isn’t exactly a D1 hotbed. What Maryville is, is exceptionally coached, year after year, and has a roster full of kids who know the game and play smart, disciplined, outstanding football. More often than not though when you play against another team that also has good coaching and good youth programs and some athletes there’s just not an answer for, the other team wins. See: Pearl Cohn in the 1990s, Whitehaven a few years back, Oakland right now. Oakland’s on another level this year, if the wins over the private schools and that defending champ out of Mississippi weren’t a clue lol. But Maryville isn’t going anywhere, and there’ll be more gold balls just like the ones that followed some of those other playoff losses. Anyway hats off to Maryville, and Oakland too. It’s been a great year to follow. Go Rebels!

Pretty solid hands to the face to start out the clip there too, with a zebra looking right at it from 5 yards away. Que sera, sera.

That was a fun finish though. Good to see Corey Walker get up there in OT, hope he's not too gimpy heading into Bradley Central.

Two different classifications, but that 1997 Pearl Cohn team with John Henderson and Santonio Beard against 2012 Whitehaven would probably be really fun to watch.

Went to my first OR game last night! TJ Johnson looked like a load and I saw him get into the backfield on more than one play even with Fulton doubling him. He had a couple plays early on where he just blew straight past the blocking, but Malone consistently had the mobility to scramble and make a throw. The wet was definitely a factor. OR had a number of dropped passes that - to their credit - Fulton made when they needed them. See: Malone getting mobile and putting the ball downfield, especially the 4th down conversion for a TD with like 20 seconds left in the half. That was a back-breaker. OR did look like a different team offensively when Gibbons came in. I see what you all mean about wondering what the offense would look like if he'd had more time this season. Question for anyone who saw it, about that onside kick after OR pulled to 21-13. Fulton ran it back down pretty deep into OR territory, but OR got called for an illegal touch before the ball went 10 yards and they put the ball back. Am I crazy or did they not put any time back on the clock? There was a pretty good runoff while the Fulton return guy was lumbering downfield. Thought it was worth mentioning since I read about Fulton thinking there were some home-cooking calls, there were definitely some officiating choices that hurt OR, too. Also, pass interference in the end zone should make it first and goal, right? OR scored on the next play, but I was curious to see what would have happened if they hadn't, because the scoreboard had the play as 3rd and goal from the 2 even after the interference call. Anyway it was a fun environment! Definitely looking forward to the playoffs. I may be a Maryville alum, but we live in OR now and the kids are old enough they've taken an interest.

Let me see if I've got this... Maryville plays 3A Alcoa who won state last year, and D2-A Webb who won state last year, and 5A West who lost the title game by a point last year - and who are all still playing right now. Those lower division opponents mean that Maryville has a weaker schedule than a 7AAA team like Oakland, because Maryville's schedule isn't as loaded with 6A teams like Brentwood (who lost to 3A CPA), or Siegel (who lost to 5A Ooltewah), or White Station (who lost to 5A Melrose). But also, Maryville should play Fulton. Because if you *are* playing a local powerhouse from a lower division, people need to remember that those aren't 6A schools and your schedule is weaker. But if you *aren't* playing a local powerhouse from another division, then you're avoiding them. Does that cover the bases? For the rational readers here lol, Maryville and Oakland are both great teams with great fans, and I'm really looking forward to this game. It should be a real battle, and it really is a treat playing a Rutherford County team this time of year.

Okay seriously now... I don't know enough about Fulton to say much one way or the other about how they'd do based on their own merits. I will say this, if you ask most Maryville folks, they're going to say that you're not going to beat Maryville by out-scheming or out-executing them. That's the whole point of pride about being a precision machine thing, everyone knows exactly what their job is and goes and does it without screwing up, game after game, year in and year out. In recent history when Maryville loses a big game, it seems like it's almost always because they come up against a team with overwhelming talent, some player there's just no answer for. It's been that way since way before Coach Quarles, too. When Don Story was coach Maryville had a fine team in 1986 that didn't lose a game, except two against an Austin East team that'd later put Leroy Thompson in the NFL. When Tim Hammontree was coach, Maryville lost a title game to a Pearl Cohn team that had Santonio Beard and John Henderson on it. More recently, Mark Dodson looked pretty unstoppable for Whitehaven. I would absolutely love to see Maryville play more games against teams that could go toe to toe based on X's and O's, just a solid bunch of kids who play fundamentally sound ball, with maybe a sprinking of standout D1-type athletes from time to time. Is Fulton one of those? Y'all tell me! I genuinely don't know. That 2009 game that Maryville lost to Alcoa, where the Tornados basically said "hey we're going to just run it down your throat and there's nothing you can do about it"? That's about the last time I can think of that Maryville was just plain whipped, and not out-athleted at some skill position. Anyway I'm with Photoman lol, just happy to see another dominant team out of the east. Other than knowing Xavier Hawkins went to Oregon State, and that Fulton's third string seems to put up as many points as their first against most teams, I don't know much about them.

In honor of gloaters everywhere, I give you my idea for the most obnoxiously egotistical game I can come up with. I vote we start a new tradition in Blount County. During Alcoa week, we meet up with the Tornadoes on a neutral site somewhere. Take 11 of our trophies and 11 of theirs. Put little Rebel and Tornado helmets on them, and a little football sticker on one of them for each team. Strap them to Roombas, and run them around playing a game with them. If the one with the ball sticker crosses the end zone line, you win! I wanted to say you score instead of win, but with 22 Roombas bumping into each other and changing directions, I doubt anyone ever actually scores. Can we make this happen? I can't express how much I would love to see this.

Apocalypse: Maryville City Schools and Alcoa City Schools merging into a single school system and having a single, combined high school? Maryville and Alcoa together would have a combined enrollment about the same as a school like Oakland or Riverdale or Whitehaven, interestingly enough. You know some people would be all over the wacky juice and want to see The Rebnadoes (hey, if there are Sharknadoes...) play schools from South Carolina and New Jersey and all that nonsense.

PS - the real Blount County football apocalypse happens if we bulldoze the public library there where Sky City used to be, and use that land for its proper calling: a football stadium. Let Maryville and Alcoa work out land annexation so that the city border is there just a little south of Hannum, and everything north of the 50 yard line is Alcoa, and everything south is Maryville. Make a horse-shoe stadium, with the south end zone open to the greenbelt. Maybe 12,000-15,000 seats. People can park at Midland Center and walk a couple blocks over.

LOL shhhh that doesn't fit the narrative! I think it was probably pretty new when I started there (1976). The whole open classroom thing was pretty novel.

"Alcoa High School has 343 resident students and 193 tuition students". People slay me. Alcoa has tuition students? So what? Repeat slowly after me - not... everything... is... about... football. To reiterate: Alcoa High has a whole lot more tuition students *than they have football players on their entire roster*, and somehow the takeaway value is that it's about recruiting? Here's the deal. Maryville and Alcoa City Schools have a long history of being thought of as better schools, academically, when compared to their Blount County counterparts. Doesn't mean it's necessarily right, but it was that way when I was in school and I doubt much has changed. I lived in Maryville and went to Alcoa Elementary, by the way, so in my own years I would have been one of the kids propping up this bizarre argument that tuition students have to have something to do with football. My folks sent me there because they believed that crazy blue hexagon was the best school in town for grade school kids. I wouldn't be surprised to find that a good number of those tuition students in high school have been there since kindergarten, and good luck convincing anyone that was a football decision.

Warning: this is going to be really, really long! First of all, have to say that I hate to see a 7AAA offseason thread turn into a comparison-to-Maryville session. I get that the Rebels are pretty much the measuring stick for success right now though, and Rutherford County is accustomed to winning so naturally the conversation is going to turn to - well what's it going to take to get over that hump? You all have a bunch of proud programs, and truthfully I love that we've been getting to play one of you guys every year because I'd much rather come out on top in a real slobberknocker that you're talking about years later, than have a cakewalk to the title. And Rutherford County fields some good, solid challenges with games that are anything but a foregone conclusion.I mean take nothing away from some of the other games we play, but a fair chunk of the schedule some years consists of "well if we play our game and take care of business then this should go fine." Then we come up against great teams, from off somewhere else, with little to no common opponents, and it's a refreshing change to look at an upcoming Friday night and really have no idea what to expect. Hats off to you guys! And I still wish we could have played against Stockstill with two legs. That kid was just exceptional. Anyway it's been said already more eloquently than I'm able to, but I think it's Maryville's brand of football that wins games - that combined with kids with gigantic hearts and wills who are willing to buy into the effort and discipline it takes to succeed on every single play. We get a fair number of standout athletes, but those are icing, not the cake, you know? Like was mentioned, we may have a D1 guy or two on the roster one year, others, maybe not. We always seem to stay balanced, we always seem to shy away from playing kids two ways where we can. What I love about high school football is that at this level, Maryville football works, and you can see the edge where that one philosophy (fundamentals and execution) runs into another (talent and athleticism). Some years? Maryville's way will take all comers - we'll have just enough athletes to hang with anyone. Other years? You can see where the college game is going, where execution still counts but you have to have the speed or size or power to compete. Last year? Forget officials and overtime and all that... Maryville just didn't have an answer for Dodson all game long. He ran for what, like 300-something? But this year, without him, Whitehaven is a 9-3 team and done in the second round. Remember John Henderson at Pearl-Cohn? They ran this one play where he was a *receiver*! I mean what the heck... he just went and hung out in the end zone and stuck his hand up and there wasn't a kid on that Maryville roster who could do a thing about it, because even in high school Henderson was like 12 feet tall and weighed 1500 pounds. Even if you could've jumped high enough, you'd have to battle through like a half a mile of body to get to where he was catching. Other years, we've seen some pretty good players have some pretty pedestrian outings against good Maryville teams - Riggs at Red Bank comes to mind. I suppose where I'm going with this is that Maryville has a particular brand of play, and year after year we get great kids who are all-in on playing that brand of football, and it's had some pretty remarkable results. So since we're seemingly going to be seeing each other for some time to come, let's introduce ourselves! Who are all you 7AAA guys? If you (for whichever school you support) had to sum up "well this is our identity as a program" what would it be? And take it further, who do you have coming up that fits what you're trying to do - or is it the other way around and you fit what you're trying to do to the kids you have coming up?

I still don't know what to think lol. I'm with Gov, I need a drink

Okay how many other Rebels are biting their tongues avoiding the obvious spoiler of the night right about now? smh

Pep yeah you're totally right. I blame too much staring at columns of names and numbers!

Well you got me curious so I put together the stats as near as I can figure them. The Daily Times runs a box score each week after the game. Can't tell how much of this is Garrett and how much of it is Carroll as far as yards and TDs; Carroll threw for a few after some games were in hand, and some others earlier on in some games too for that matter if I remember correctly. And they didn't list INTs at all in some of the box scores so I couldn't get those together with any hope of accuracy. Anyway here's the numbers: vs Webb: 13-17 for 166 and 2td vs Alcoa: 4-10 for 129 and 2td vs West: 6-16 for 60 and 0td vs Hardin Valley: 16-20 for 247 and 1td vs Sevier County: 10-14 for 180 and 2td vs Heritage: 10-13 for 86 and 1td vs Lenoir City: 15-19 for 288 and 3td vs William Blount: 8-13 for 147 and 1td vs Bearden: 11-15 for 192 and 3td vs Farragut: 13-20 for 274 and 2td vs Bradley Central: 9-13 for 140 and 3td vs Morristown East: 9-10 for 153 and 4td vs Sevier County: 6-9 for 136 and 2td Totals: 130-189 (68.8%) for 2198 yards (169 ypg) and 26 TDs Anyway the short version is that Maryville's always a balanced, pick your poison sort of team offensively, and pretty astute at reading what the defense is giving them.

And yeah, huge congrats on the little twister APB!

That sound you hear is pretty much every Maryville fan who's been hearing that stuff for years, laughing at this sentiment. In case anyone missed it, Alcoa handled Catholic (a team alive in the 4A semis right now) 49-7 this year. They beat Fulton (the team that's probably going to knock Catholic out of the playoffs next week) 30-7 the year before that. Cleveland and Fulton the year before that? Check. Maryville the year before that? Check (ouch). Rankin will be the first to tell you that Alcoa has depth issues when competing against the schools with much larger enrollments, but the results on the field speak for themselves.

Not before I get my two cents worth in! Well, maybe a buck and a half's worth, I get long winded. Now the problem I think we have with this whole 4AAA or 7AAA or whoeverAAA debate is this... Dynastic programs are outliers, and you can't reliably use them to discredit the teams they compete against. Mav4life's excellent analysis shows how the divisions fare top-to-bottom. 4AAA actually behaves a lot like 7AAA if you stop paying attention to Maryville - there's an ebb and a flow to who's on top - or in our case who's in the running for second. Just a couple years ago Bearden was upending an undefeated Dobyns-Bennett team (2010) and undefeated Sevier County team (2009) in the playoffs. They've fallen off since then, though, and now other teams like West or Farragut are better, just like Riverdale is down right now. Generally speaking, the Knoxville-area teams have had favorable results against the upper-East teams for a while now, and that's pretty consistently the matchups we have available to look at when it comes to Perennial-Contenders-Who-Aren't-Maryville, come playoff time. You just don't see a whole lot of 4AAA teams, or East Tennessee teams as a whole, getting stuck in the second quad come playoff time, though, so that we'd have those head-to-head matchups to talk about. When eastern teams other than Maryville do get seeded somewhere other than the 1-quad, they fare pretty well I think. Blackman over Farragut 41-38 in 2011 has been mentioned - Farragut was 3rd in 4AAA, Blackman 2nd in 7AAA that year. Also, not 4AAA, but Oak Ridge had a team in 2010 that had been 6-4 going into the playoffs (with losses to Maryville and Farragut from 4AAA), that got pushed out into quad 2 and didn't do anything but win it over Riverdale. Of course most of 7AAA was in quad 3 that year, so what can you do...

Interesting corollary there, actually... the Big East of all people has the best bowl win pct. in the BCS era (going back to '98). Guess they're the big dogs.

See here's the thing... So the entire country is in the shape that it's in, because a handful of people on a high school sports message board aren't on board with you about what's evidently your issue with a particular, unnamed coaching staff, about playing time. I think you're probably just frustrated and venting here and not really trying to win anyone over to your cause, but people are going to jump all over this thread because you're pretty much just shooting from the hip. Who knows, you may have a legit beef. But when you start making crazy sweeping generalizations like that and not a soul here has a clue about any real specifics because none have been provided, I don't know what else to expect. What's actually going on at this school? PS, these kids are not pro athletes, they're in high school. If we run with your idea and let them consider jumping from one school to the next based on sports participation, right in the middle of a school year and disregarding the disruption that'd cause to their education, isn't that a bigger concern when it comes to disservice to their future?

Assuming nothing really unexpected happens, and the bracket pans out like it ought to, Fulton-Greeneville in the playoffs should make for a really entertaining game. It's the sort of game where, if you're an objective bystander, it looks like Train A and Train B leaving their respective stations, and heading straight at each other at 100 mph for two months. I love those match-ups where you don't have to decide who wins on a message board. Can't wait!

That last one had to hurt. SC had strung a couple first downs together, then got picked off and left Maryville a short field. Maryville overcame a sack and a holding call to get their 4th score.