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Originally Posted by TXMike
Talk about movie - material...how about this one from California this last week. Instead of taking a knee they tried for one more score, and you can imagine the rest of the story...
From sbsun.com (San Bernadino CA)
Coach's calls prove hard to decipher
Article Launched:11/25/2006 12:53:50 AM PST
BLOOMINGTON - Don Markham has been the most fascinating prep football coach in Southern California for most of the past 3 & 1/2 decades.
As an innovator. An iconoclast. The Great Exception. An aloof, sometimes arrogant coach who zigged when the coaching herd zagged.
He is known for running up huge numbers out of his smash-mouth, ground-pounding offense, including 108 points in a single game and a then-national record 880 in a season.
He has agitated administrators from Oregon to Rialto and Colton with his blowouts and occasional blowups at players. And also won 300 games and five CIF-Southern Section championships along the way.
He often has been known as The Genius, by admirers, particularly from 1994-99, when his teams went 64-14.
He also has been called The Genius by competitors, often mockingly, particularly since he returned to Bloomington High School in 2002 and seen his Bruins struggle to a pedestrian 42-37 record.
Both Don Markhams were on display in a bizarre Eastern Division playoff game Friday night in Bloomington.
The Genius his supporters love, whose Bruins took a 30-17 lead over third-seeded La Quinta with 40.5 seconds to play.
And The Genius (wink-wink, nudge-nudge) his detractors mock, whose team gave up 14 points in the final 33.6 seconds in a stunning 31-30 defeat.
Bottom line? Bloomington wins the game if the Bruins take a knee four times at the La Quinta 3 with 1:36 to play.
Markham said that was his plan. But, he said, his players talked him out of it as La Quinta took its last timeout, with 1:31 left. "The kids said, `Let us pound it in, coach."'
Tony Davis scored on third down, but the 2-point conversion failed. And La Quinta was going to get the ball back in a game that could have, should have been a 24-17 Bruins victory.
"Game is over," La Quinta coach Dan Armstrong said, when asked what would have happened if Bloomington took a knee four times.
"But I told my coaches, `He will not take a knee. That is not on his resume."'
After the TD Bloomington didn't knee, the Markham who loves points but often struggles to keep from giving them up, came on display.
La Quinta took over at its 26 with 33.6 seconds left. Three plays later, Ryan Woods ran 40 yards for a touchdown with 6.3 seconds left.
La Quinta recovered on onside kick with 2.0 seconds left. On the next play, Woods threw a 48-yard TD pass to Justin Smith as time expired.
Said Markham, on the sideline: "They just won, didn't they?"
Well, yes, they had, once Ty James kicked the decisive PAT, sending the La Quinta players into a frenzy and the Bruins into gloom darker than their navy blue uniforms.
It was vintage Markham. All of it.
His team had two drives of brutal, beautiful simplicity. One took 80 yards and took 12 plays and 7:05 off the clock. Another went 66 yards in 11 and burned 3:10.
But Markham teams never have been known for pass defense, and almost no lead is safe. His preferred manner for defending the pass is getting to the quarterback before he can find receivers running free open in the secondary.
On the game's final play, La Quinta's Armstrong was stunned when Bloomington not only didn't deploy five defenders strung deep across the field ... but assigned only one defender to the Blackhawks' best player, Smith.
"I couldn't believe he was single-covered," Armstrong said. "Couldn't believe it. And he was open."
Thus, Markham's most promising team since his 1999 Leuzinger team went 11-2 and reached the semifinals, went down. When it could have met in the semifinals next week a Silverado team it defeated earlier this season.
Markham is 67 years old. He has been running programs since 1970, after he gave up his career as a cop with the LAPD. (He was the first officer on the scene of the Manson family/Sharon Tate murder scene in 1969.)
It has been suggested the game has passed him by. That he has become a sort of Joe Paterno of CIF-SS football. That his double-wing offense is passe, and that his teams' general inability to cover the pass is deadly in a chuck-the-ball-around era.
His supporters demur. "The kids aren't devoted to weight-lifting the way they used to be," said Damien Logan, a Bruins assistant who played for the 1999 title team.
Jesse Hernandez, who played for Markham title teams at Bloomington in 1994, 1996 and 1997, suggested the Bruins have chemistry problems, failing to mesh as a unit the way Markham teams did a decade ago. "And it's on them, not Coach Markham."
Markham, afterward, seemed preoccupied by the injury to wingback Jonathan Hackett, who stayed down long enough on a first-quarter play that game officials wouldn't let him return, even though Hackett said he was ready to play.
"If Hackett plays, we win by three, four, five touchdowns," Markham said. "I ran out of running backs."
But even without Hackett ... Bloomington wins if it kills the clock.
Markham said he plans to continue coaching, after he undergoes knee surgery (perhaps replacement) during the offseason.
He has said he would like to die on the football field. "But after I win a CIF title," he said with a thin smile. "Not after this one."
He paused.
"We should have won this one," he conceded, staring into the distance. "I should have taken a knee two, three more times."
Don Markham. Controversial. Always. Still. And never, ever dull.
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