Continuously serving Kosciusko County since 1854
Two topics this morning illustrate some parallels on my mind.
The first, almost two weeks ago I recall, as Fox Sports 1 First Things First sports talk show tri-host Nick Wright appeared on the same cable sports channel’s Herd with Colin Cowherd, a conversation about pro football that made me think about area high school football.
The aforementioned hosts spoke about one of the top 5 coldest NFL playoff games taking place January 13, 2024.
One point they made is the more intricate offensive schemes get in the NFL; the less NFL head coaches look as comparatively large or athletic as the men he’s coaching. This particular playoff game featured burly head coach Andy Reid and somewhat nebbish-looking Mike McDaniel.
McDaniel was bundles from head to toe, almost looking as puffy as the Michelin Man although he was smaller and thinner than al his players, and considerably smaller than Coach Reid, who was clad in ordinary winter-time coaching time – nothing extraordinarily winter proofing.
In fact, Reid had ice forming on his thick mustache.
This seemed to be a harbinger of the outcome, a 26-7 Chiefs win en route to a Super Bowl championship.
From a local perspective, it’s difficult to predict how far a high school football team will survive in the rigors of postseason play, weather, and staying healthy into the November weeks of high school football.
I strongly believe, though, two things you see on the field and sideline for Warsaw absolutely have to trigger a doubletake from opponents and their fan bases in November football games against the Tigers.
The first is the Warsaw offensive line whose moniker is The Wild Hogs. Regardless of the temperature you’ll never see them in long sleeve undergarments. The Green Bay Packers linemen do the same when they host chilly weather games on (spoken in the inimitable John Facenda’s deep voice) “the frozen tundra of Lambeau Field.”
The second is Bart Curtis outdoors in 2024 regional and semistate championship games in shorts.
Business as usual in huge games. Same weekly preparation, same work uniforms in fact.
Regardless of how deep the Tigers advance in postseason play, these optics can be intimidating if opposing coaches, players, and fans are not in the right place.
The second parallel, a seed planted in the late 1980s, involved the sit-com, Seinfeld. This NBC product eventually became, inarguably, one of the greatest network television comedies whose run spanned July 5, 1989, until mid-May 1998, was a show reluctantly greenlit with a hidden agenda of retaining talent in order to keep such talent out of competitors’ hands.
Jerry Seinfeld was a standup comedian who was catching the attention of producers to exploit his relatable humor though other channels (a sit-com? talk show? cable special?). In fact, Seinfeld killed as a talk show guest among all the networks’ late-night shows.
NBC signed Seinfeld and encouraged him to work on a sitcom with another (eventual) comedy icon, Larry David, but network executives felt his test shows were not well-received. They didn’t kick the duo to the curb (no pun intended if you know…) but instead kept them busy volleying feedback between network executives and the Seinfeld-David duo.
NBC’s initial intention was not to incubate sit-com cold while signing this duo. Instead, the network’s root agenda was letting them work on their show to keep them busy while under contract so Seinfeld would not host a talk show launched to compete with NBC’s Tonight Show with Johnny Carson from a competing network.
The show, in fact, made its inauspicious NBC debut Wednesday, July 5, 1989. The network bought four episodes; the least amount of episodes NBC had ever bought for any new show. It debuted in the middle of summer, on a programming night dwarfed by NBC’s Thursday night murderer’s row of Cosby (#1-rated), Cosby spin-off, A Different World (#4), and Cheers (#3).
Network execs still hated Seinfeld but kept it in their mitts when Fox offered Seinfeld and David an opportunity to jump to their burgeoning network.
Most folks know how all this ended, and I’ve given a sports column greater than 290 words on a sit-com. Here comes the sports side.
College football scholarships, about halfway through the aforementioned sit-com’s run in 1994, reduced their limit to allowable Division 1 football scholarships from 95 to 85. The original cap was set at 105 in 1973 following the passing of Title IX by Congress as part of the Equal Opportunity in Education Act (1972). The NCAA reduced the number from 105 to 95 in 1978.
Big-time college football programs used limitless, and the scholarship caps of 105 and 95 to recruit talent fully realizing most of these athletes will see very little action in their four eligible seasons, but satisfied with a by-product of having the budget to fund so many free rides: keeping opposing and rival programs from signing these players and facing them in a consequential game.
Most of the dozen readers of Chip Shots already know I grew up in Northeast Ohio, so I am unable to live in two places at once to see how much this was happening in the Times-Union readership area.
What I do know, however, is how these abundant scholarships were used in the area where I grew up among Ohio State, Michigan, Notre Dame, Penn State, and (in the 1970s and early 1980s) Pitt who recruited aggressively from my native region.
The three latter schools, considerably farther from Columbus and Ann Arbor, were formidable competing programs well-known for a roster chock-full of Buckeye State prep gridders.
These days, each of these schools’ football rosters – with only 85 available full-ride scholarships – have far more athletes from more current football power states like Georgia, California, Texas (to name a few), and among the five programs, the first four noted have or will won or vied for several recent NCAA Division 1 football national titles.
I had no predictions or hot takes this morning, and no minutia of IHSAA class/sectional alignment discussions, just parallels.
Enjoy the continually increasing choices of high school, college and professional sports training camps and regular season action until we meet again next week.
