Have mercy!
No, we really should have a mercy rule at all levels of high school football. In South Dakota. In every state.
Then, a pointless controversy would not have broken out on Thursday night:
Pierre 103, Spearfish 0.
The perfect storm erupted with a mismatch before it started: A top-ranked, 9-0 team whose average score was 58-7 against an 0-9, last-place outfit which the Governors beat 72-0 a month ago and which lost its games by an average score of 38-2.
Now, a perfect storm of finger-pointing has ensued from border-to-border, and beyond the Rushmore State’s borders. This is already a regional headline via the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Potentially 143,000 Twitter followers read about it from Paul Pabst, the producer of the nationally syndicated “Dan Patrick Show” (weekdays 8-11 a.m. on KWSN), who retweeted KWSN’s tweet of the score and added “C’mon, Spearfish.”
Expect national outlets to write blurbs about it. Absurdity has ripple effects in the internet age, and this kind of publicity is not the best kind for South Dakota.
103-0. Dang. Whose fault is it? There are no easy answers. But I’ll take a stab:
Have mercy… rule.
You could blame the Governors and head coach Steve Steele, but you probably shouldn’t. There have been conflicting reports on how much they let off the gas once up 35-0 thru three minutes of play. Most starters and several backups were reportedly out of the game well before the 75-0 halftime score.
But whoever on Pierre’s team played out the second half should not have had to take a knee to end the game as soon as possible. That’s showing up the other team as much as continuing to score.
As veteran South Dakota sportscaster Mike Henriksen wrote in a Facebook post:
(Pierre’s) starters have rarely played more than a half all year. Kids do not work hard to not play. Kids do not work hard to take a knee each down. Kids can’t help the other team’s mistakes. Young backups want to do well when they get the chance… But I will not blame kids for playing hard when they are on the field. No kid goes out for a sport so they can practice. They go out so they can perform in games.
Sioux Falls Lincoln coach Jared Fredenberg has been on both sides of extreme blowouts in his three years leading the Patriots — the first two taking plenty of lumps as the nail and this season as the hammer.
“It’s tough being on both sides,” Fredenberg said on Saturday’s KWSN Coaches Show. “With Coach Steele, you know, it’s not your job to stop yourself. When you have young (reserve) kids doing it, you want them to have fun, too.”
But not that much fun. Not 82-0, 89-0, 96-0, 103-0 fun.
Spearfish coach Chad McCarty claims the Governors players appeared to be enjoying the prospect, then reality, of seeing that scoreboard hit triple digits to etch in eternity, a hangin’ of a hundred!
(Actually, turns out the Pierre scoreboard read “03-00” because there are only two slots for each teams’ score).
And who could blame them — they’re 15-to-18-year-old kids doing something out of the ordinary.
If there was a mercy rule, Pierre would not have had the power to decide how to handle it, nor would there be the potential of those players celebrating something mature adults know they shouldn’t, and things getting contentious even if the coaches were intending to stay classy.
You could blame the Spartans for being lousy at football, but you probably shouldn’t. There are lousy teams everywhere in sports. It’s going to happen. Spearfish scored 23 points for the entire season! They failed to score in 7 of 10 games and could not reach the end zone in each of their seven games against 11AA teams. They were taking plastic butter knives to a fight against a team full of nuclear warheads.
Should McCarty have forfeited the game, either before it started, or at halftime? Take his ball and go home? Nobody would have blamed him. Or some would have. He’d potentially be the poster coach for teaching kids they should quit in life when the going gets (ridiculously) rough.
If there was a mercy rule, the coach of the oppressed would not be forced into that decision. There would still be the scarlet letter shame of losing 75-0… at halftime. And being mercy-ruled. Nobody wants to be mercy-ruled. But it is better than playing out an even worse fate, and score, and being hopeless.
Many are blaming the coaches and athletic directors who put their heads together to create a seventh class in football in a state of under 900,000 people. The top enrollment class was divided into two starting in 2014, and with Harrisburg’s move up to the largest class (11AAA), it left Pierre’s Class 11AA with only eight teams, forcing every team in that class to play in the playoffs.
That, to me, had little bearing on Thursday night. This mockery of a game was a lightning rod for those who feel the top two classes should go back to one, but it should not be. It should be a lightning rod for a mercy rule or a running clock, and also for perhaps revising how many teams in the top two classes should qualify for the playoffs. Perhaps not every team deserves a postseason. In smaller classes, teams have to earn it.
So, here is who you should blame: The coaches of Class 11AA who continue to decide to not implement a mercy rule, or at least a running clock. A committee of coaches could vote to push for the rule, which would then be voted on by athletic directors, but that never happens.
It is time to have a mercy rule and running clock like the five smallest classes in South Dakota have.
If a team is up by at least 50 at halftime, it is over. The point in the second half when the margin is at 50, done.
By 50-0, let alone 75-0, the winning team has made its point. What good does continuing with a game do?
A running clock when a team leads by at least 35 points in the second half is a fine idea, too. Kim Nelson, the all-time wins leader in South Dakota high school football history, is a proponent of that, but not a mercy rule in 11AAA.
When his roster of 85-90 players is playing a home varsity game in front of a larger throng of Sioux Falls Roosevelt fans, Nelson wants his third-and-forth string reserves to have a chance to be on the field and “play a little bit, have some fun,” in front of their families and classmates.
“But we’re not trying to rub it in or score on every play,” Nelson said on Saturday on KWSN. “We tell our quarterbacks we are not going to throw. We are just going to run it, stay in bounds, keep the clock running and run some really basic plays. There are times we run the same play several times in a row and hope the defense stops it. You don’t want the other team to feel like you are pouring it on.”
Although Roosevelt’s offensive system is based on a lot of passes in space to skill players, it goes into a shell when the score is out of hand. The reserves can run the full menu of potentially fun and explosive pass plays and trickery in their freshmen, sophomore, and junior varsity games.
But when there is a 50-point lead at any point after halftime, especially when it is 75-to-freaking-zero, it should be time to shut it down to prevent the carnage that ensued in Pierre, when the coach of the aggressor is caught between wanting his reserves to have a chance to make plays while not rubbing the opponents’ face in the dirt, while the coach of the afflicted doesn’t want to wave a white towel and call off the game.
When the teams are separated by seven touchdowns by halftime or any point after, what is the point of even having a running clock, of staying out there? If even running basic, non-threatening plays still yields touchdowns and provides further embarrassment and potentially injury, what good is still playing doing?
In any sport that has a form of a “mercy rule” that I have ever attended, especially youth sports, I have not seen or heard one soul complain when the game is called. And you would know it, because sports fans, and especially sports parents, don’t hide much their inner thoughts and opinions these days, in case you haven’t noticed.
I never see complaints from the winning team, which has executed successfully and celebrated repeatedly its ability to better its opponent. Most players or coaches in that predicament are quite happy they have ended their work early. Most people like to leave work early, if possible.
No complaints from the losing team, which at a certain point is well past the will to win, or to even tack on a few pride points.
The coaches have had enough. The players have had enough. And the fans have certainly had enough. Especially in an outdoor game where the weather is either oppressively hot, cold, windy, rainy, or snowy.
It was about 30 degrees in Pierre on Thursday night. Do you think any fans wanted to stick around for that second half to sit and watch the Governors continue to humiliate the Spartans?
Hell no. I’m guessing those from Spearfish — three hours away — would have been just fine with getting in their warm cars and arriving home before midnight, the same way Pierre fans were ready to (and many probably did) go home.
“It’s not any fun, Fredenburg said of being on the right side of that dash in a lopsided score at least halfway into the game.
“We want to get out of there, too,” Fredenberg said. “Get the clock rolling, keep it going, get the game over with, get on the bus, and head back home.”
Sure, some reserves for Pierre would have enjoyed the opportunity to make plays on the varsity stage after all the practice and sacrifice they put in. But most of them had done so in the 75-0 first half. And if some hadn’t, shame on the coaches for not having all reserves in after it was 50-0.
Judging by social media response, there has been as much if not more sympathy for players and coaches from Pierre as/than Spearfish from all this, that it is unfortunate the Governors’ players, who by this point are used to cake walk wins every week — don’t get the opportunity to play in more competitive games.
We could have a discussion about combining the two largest classes back into one so an 11AA juggernaut like Pierre could have the chance to line up with 11AAA’s titans like Roosevelt, Lincoln, O’Gorman, Brandon Valley, etc.
The much more realistic scenario is the Governors’ powers-that-be — coaches and administration — decide they are such a machine, it is time to “petition up” and join 11AAA.
Sioux Falls O’Gorman’s enrollment for decades classifies them for the second-largest class, but the Knights choose to play with the big boys and girls. Sure, there are competitive advantages at a private institution in the heart of the state’s largest city that may even things out, but O’G chooses to give its student-athletes the best possible experience.
Pierre has earned the respect, adulation, and envy of every high school football operation in the nation. It has built itself to being virtually unbeatable while being in the middle of enrollment numbers in its class and located in a relatively isolated place. Coach Steve Steele and the community have made the sport matter, the kids motivated to play it and be elite at it, and they’ve done it so well, it overwhelms the competition and turns most games into snoozefests.
If the Governors decide they are bored or unfulfilled beating up on their enrollment peers — pun intended — and want to take tougher tests, nobody will stop them.
And if they decide they aren’t, a mercy rule should.
