Inside the Cupboard

Football season came to an end for three Jackson County teams this past Friday night.

Sneads High School will move to the playoffs. They finished the season with a 7-3 regular season record. Cottondale High School finished with the very same 7-3 record. Graceville and Marianna had a year of rebuilding with both recording a 1-9 record.

FHSAA changed their playoff ‘rules’ for lack of a better word this year. Your 1-9 or even 0-10 teams qualified previously. Somewhere some of the sleepers in the back woke up and smelled the Maxwell House and I, for one, am glad they did.

I feel the same way about Family Feud. You have to get 300 points to move on to the $20,000 bonus round. One family can win all four rounds but if they don’t reach 300, then you have a sudden death and the one who buzzes in with the correct answer first, gets to advance.

That just doesn’t seem right to me. Same with football. If you’re record is so dismal, should your team be given the opportunity to advance with a 99% chance of that one game being the end for you but possibly being a moving on in the playoffs for a more qualified team?

This year, FHSAA took into consideration the quality of the teams that each team played, as it should be. I feel for those teams on the fence that were so close but as in all things, there has to be a cutoff.

I saw all of that to say this: Marianna played their last home game Friday night against South Walton. The Seahawks had a substantial lead in the fourth quarter. On their last drive, they ran in circles, they took a knee, and they never opted to try for another score in the game.

One point more and they’d have had 50 points, something any high school team would be glad to boast. However, their class act came through loud and clear. This is something I’ve ranted about for years. Why in the world would you take pride in slamming a team into the ground?

Furthermore, why would you do it to another county team? I took a ton of criticism over posting scores one Saturday morning from the previous night. I was asked why I would do that to a team of young players. I took it because that’s what I do. But, as always, I look back at what teams have done in the past.

That same team defeated the team that beat them the previous Friday night 51-22 one year earlier. At the start of the fourth quarter, the score was 38-22 but yet they added two additional touchdowns to make it a 29-point defeat rather than a 16-point defeat. God doesn’t like ugly and that was ugly and Karma is alive and well, and that’s from Inside the Cupboard.