I can’t really say I’m in favor of what this team did, but it comes off as considerably less heartless than hoopster Epiphanny Prince’s 113-point explosion earlier this year.
I don’t really care one way or the other about the score, here. If there needs to be a mercy rule in sports at that level, write one. Don’t make it an unwritten rule.
The other team lost. They’d still have an L in that column at the end of the game, whether they gutted it out, or walked away.
What irks me is that players could get hurt out there, and the coach left in a pretty talented guy who could easily have jeopardized his future career in a stupid, pointless accident in a meaningless game his team was already going to win. That tells me it wasn’t for the kid’s benefit at all, not at all — the coach should’ve been thinking of his kids’ safety first, and the record second, only if it was safe to do so.
I think the question here is how the other team’s coach felt about this. Generally, it’d be unsportsmanlike, but there are noble qualities here.
Generally I agree with where you’re coming from here. However, the above comparison really isn’t a good one. In rugby there is no “second string”. Typically you have 7 subs available to cover the 15 players on the pitch. So generally you cannot sub all of your starters (obviously there are exceptions to this such as in a “friendly” match).
And just because rugby players have a different outlook AFTER the game doesn’t mean they won’t keep kicking your ass during the game. Rugby players are a different breed and are likely to be the type of person to say why bother playing if you’re not going to try. I ought to know. I’ve been playing for 15 years. And I’ve lost 60-0 and won 100-0. Amazingly, my self-esteem is still intact.
Once again:
The rule is better if it’s unwritten because what matters is the spirit. If it’s made into a mercy rule, then we get debates like what we had in GD - why is a 50-point win unacceptable but 48 okay? It turns it into a nitpicky thing. The margin of victory is not the issue. This really is about how you play the game. And it’s not like Kinder didn’t know what he was expected to do in this situation. The article says he normally takes McCoy out of the game at halftime, and he’s been a coach for 20 fucking years. He made a decision to go for the record, and either didn’t think or didn’t care about how it would affect anybody else.
So they should have benched all their regulars and brought in the scrubs and not try to score anymore points…and that will let the other team preserve dignity???
I’ve had my ass handed to me in athletic competition a time or two. Knowing that the other guy let up on you…makes it a LOT worse.
Might as well pat them on their soft little heads.
People continue to miss the point.
It’s not about defending the kids that lose. It is about defending the kids that win.
It is a good and healthy thing to occasionally have one’s ass handed to them. It leads to resiliance and perspective.
It is not a good thing to be encouraged by an authority figure to humiliate and embarrass an opponent. It leads to arrogance and a lack of empathy.
You’re not the only one. I do think it preserves some dignity, if nothing else because the kids’ inferiority is rubbed in their faces for half a game instead of the whole game, start to finish! I mean, in this game, Burch received the message “we think you’re so bad that we’re not even paying attention to playing right - we just want our star to set some records.” I think they’d have felt better playing against the scrubs. And like I said, Kinder knows that that’s how it works because he pulls his best player in blowouts.
This game was between Burch High School and Matewan High School in Mingo County, West Virginia. Trust me on this one; that geographic area has much bigger problems than some coach/team rubbing in their domination in a HS football match.
Beyond that, I second what Snooooopy stated.
Let’s say you sign up for a summer basketball league. Which league do you choose, the one where the pros go to keep in shape, or the one where regular schmoes play at the YMCA? I don’t know about you, but when I’m playing a game, I’d have a lot more fun playing against people who are my own skill level, win or lose. I suppose you wouldn’t feel humiliated to be dunked on 20 times in a row in the pro summer league, it’s no different than losing a game, really. Sure, they’ll be laughing at you, playing around different dunks that you can’t defend, but it’s all just competition, really, the laughter isn’t personal.
Note that these kids don’t have a choice to avoid playing the other team, the way you can avoid the NBA summer league.
As I said, I know little about rugby. My comparison was intended to show how opponents can have respect for one another, which was clearly not the case in the example stated.
Who said anything about trying not to score points? Playing second-srringers in a blowout is common practice, as it gives them game experience. It is common practice for Kinder’s team, as cited in the article. It happens in every sport. Using a no-huddle offense with a fifty point lead? Refusing to field punts? Dancing and screaming in the end zone after running the score to 64-0? You see nothing wrong with this? And to do it in part to take people’s minds off of cheating by the coach? Bullshit.
Plenty of schools lose by large margins. My favorite college team will be lucky to win one game this year. Hell, hey haven’t scored a touchdown in the last three. But any coach who left his starters in for the purpose of running up the score would be roundly criticised, and deservedly so. If he did it to deflect people’s attention from his cheating, he would be a Giant Flaming Asshole, just like Kinder.
It`s just a game. Most likely none of the kids involved is going to remember this in 5 years.
I agree that Yogi was being a jerk, but I also agree (having played football poorly in the past) that having your opponent let up on you feels like a condescending pat on the head. In any case, once the game had become a ridiculous blowout and it wasn`t fun anymore, why not just forfeit and go do something fun?
Sports are a valuable part of the education process because they can teach teamwork and good health habits. But teaching children that a game of football is actually important enough to get this upset over is just wrong.
Whoops, read too quickly and missed the part about dancing and screaming in the endzone. Change “kind of a jerk” to “fucking assclown who should retire since he apparently hasn`t taught his team a goddamn thing about sportsmanship or basic human decency.”
‘The days of carefree record setting are past’? Asshole. The opposite coach wasn’t consulted, and… wow. Complete ass.
Sportsmanship has been dying for a long time. The first nail in the coffin was hammered by Muhammad Ali – maybe there were others earlier, but he’s the first superstar I can think of who regualrly humiliated his opponents in the arena and in his public comments. Even outside of sport, the media has consistently flirted and glorified what you might call “bad boy behavior”, even though there are plenty of high-profile women like Leona Helmsley and later Paris Hilton engaging in the same totally self-indulgent behaviors.
Kids and coaches (who used to be kids) have just followed the trends of pop culture. Kind of sad but hardly surprising.
I don’t really have a problem with Ali’s behavior. I’ve always viewed, at least the in-ring aspects of it, as a calculated effort to piss of his opponent. Being pissed is actually usually a big detriment to your performance in a boxing match. It’s not much different from the kind of smack talk that happens at the line of scrimmage in football (but never really gets talked about since reporters don’t have a mic there) if you piss off the guy in front of you enough, maybe he’ll do something stupid and give your team some free yardage.
Also, when I first heard about this record and the location it was set I actually expected something like this, or at least I expected that the running back probably wasn’t that spectacular. Anyone who follows college football knows the West Virginia as a state is pretty much barren of any serious football talent most years for recruiting purposes.
But if the kid can bench 350 lbs. and squat 500 lbs. I’d probably give him a try if I was a coach, those are pretty legitimate weights for a kid who’s never been in a serious strength training program.
However, if he doesn’t have a scholarship he probably should have done something instead of hit the gym, he probably should have hit the books. The state of West Virginia offers a scholarship to all graduating high school students who have maintained a GPA of 3.0 or higher that covers all tuition and fees for any school within the state, and a few out of state schools that offer programs not offered by any school in the state. He could’ve earned that and then gone to a Division IA school like West Virginia University or Marshall and walked on with their football team if he really wanted to play college ball at the IA level.
If, after your opponent lets up on you, you start kicking his ass (the second stringers play so bad that the score is tied after the 3[SUP]rd[/SUP] quarter).
Does he go back to kicking your ass (put the starters back in) or graciously accept that under the new (self imposed) conditions he loses?
CMC fnord!
In college football two coaches who are fairly amicable towards one another will often come to “agreements” when the game’s result is all but certain. This obviously isn’t going to happen anytime it is between two teams that really need the win (two teams fighting it out for a conference title, for example.) In those sort of games both coaches are going to keep all their starters in and play with all their tenacity the entire game, no matter the score.
But when Division IA Virginia Tech is playing Division IAA James Madison and the score is 35-0 at halftime you’ll see Virginia Tech come out at the next half with most of their starters on the bench, VT will then run a “base” offense so long as JMU does pretty much the same.
A IA vs. IAA game is usually played out like this, even mediocre IA teams have more scholarship players and more overall depth especially on the offensive and defensive lines, so they sub linemen in and out throughout the beginning of the game so that they can completely wear down the other team’s line (which can’t sub out like this.)