In The News

Preseason games begin this week

Most Georgia football teams are playing their first games this week.

They don't count - they're just scrimmages - but most of the 125 preseason games will resemble the real thing. There will be another 65 scrimmages next week.

"Everything will be live except the kicking game," said M.L. King coach Mike Carson, whose team will play Cedar Grove on Saturday at Panthersville Stadium. "Otherwise, it's regular football rules."

Coaches can make their own rules. Some play regulation games and keep score, like M.L. King and Cedar Grove, while others look more like two-team practices with officials.

One scrimmage will involve three teams as Baconton Charter and Randolph-Clay will travel to Calhoun County. The three Class A teams will rotate running plays against each other.

''You get to see two different offenses and defenses and two different styles of football,'' Randolph-Clay coach Daniel McFather said.

The M.L. King-Cedar Grove game should be one of the more fun to watch. Their quarterbacks, M.L. King's Jonquel Dawson and Cedar Grove's Johnathan McCrary, each threw for more than 3,000 yards last season. Dawson's 3,611 yards rank fifth all-time for a single season. McCrary's 3,343 rank ninth.

M.L. King has reached the championship game of all eight of its 7-on-7 passing tournaments this summer, and won six.

"That says a lot about your quarterbacks and receivers, but the scrimmage against Cedar Grove will tell us how we can compete in full pads with another team," Carson said. "We're evaluating them on executing their assignments and trying to make sure the personnel we've got out there understands what we're trying to do from a scheme standpoint."

Brookwood bucks trend

Only about 10 Georgia football teams won't play preseason scrimmages before their season openers. The most conspicuous is Brookwood, the defending champion in Class AAAAA.

Brookwood didn't scrimmage last season either, then finished 14-1 for its first state title in 14 years.

Even when Brookwood has played scrimmages under coach Mark Crews, it hasn't been like a real game.

"We have done it in the past, but it has been more like a practice than a full-tilt scrimmage," Crews told GHSF Daily. "Special teams were live only until the ball was kicked, no full returns, etc. We did normal game procedure for a couple of quarters, then about five minutes each on third-down and goal-line situations."

Crews said that if his opener were the last week in August, he probably would scrimmage another team. But Brookwood always plays in the Corky Kell Kickoff Classic at the Georgia Dome, which is Aug. 20 this year, a week earlier than most teams' openers. The other seven Corky Kell teams are scrimmaging this week, including two - Grayson and North Gwinnett - against each other Friday. Brookwood's Corky Kell opponent, Lassiter, plays a scrimmage Friday against Flowery Branch.

But champs are doing their own thing.

"I'd rather be working toward preparing for our opponent in the Dome rather than preparing for a scrimmage," Crews said. "Also, we would be one week out from game time, and I would really worry that someone, a key player, may be injured in a full-tilt scrimmage and miss the beginning of the real season."

2011 scrimmage schedule

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In This Issue

In The News: Preseason games begin this week

List: Most years between state titles for a coach

Trivia: Young school champions

History Class: Cronic the latest state high school coach headed to college

List

Most years between state titles for a coach:

17 - Luther Welsh (1985, 2002 Thomson)

16 - Charlie Brake (1955 Morgan County, 1971 Westminster)

15 - Ray Lamb (1966 Warren County, 1981 Commerce)

14 - Alan Chadwick (1989, 2003 Marist)

14 - Weyman Sellers (1955, 1969 Athens)

13 - Wayman Creel (1957 Northside, 1970 Lakeside)

10 - Buzz Busby (1991 Kendrick , 2001 Statesboro)

10 - Larry Campbell (1995, 2005 Lincoln County)

Trivia

Only four schools that are currently 20 years old or younger have won state football titles in Georgia. Which are they? (Answer Wednesday)

Answer to Monday's question: With seven each, Florida, Mississippi and Virginia are the Southern states with the most members of the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Georgia is next with six. This is based on where the Hall of Famers played high school football.

History Class   

Cronic the latest state high school coach headed to college

Danny Cronic, who won 222 games in 30 seasons as a Georgia high school coach, took a new job this year as the first head coach for Reinhardt University in Waleska in his native Cherokee County.

It's unusual for Georgia high school head coaches to take college jobs, although perhaps Cronic - best known for his state contenders at LaGrange and East Coweta - is part of a trend.

In 2005, Shorter University in Rome hired Phil Jones to start its football program. Jones was a head coach for 25 years in Georgia, where he had a 159-107-4 record at Winder-Barrow, Dooly County, Fitzgerald and Jeff Davis, although he had been in college coaching for a time, including at Georgia (1997-2001), before getting the Shorter job.

Here are 10 other notable Georgia high school head coaches who took college jobs:

*Billy Atkins, the head coach of Troy State's NAIA national championship team of 1968, was head coach of Jordan of Columbus in 1965, the year before taking the Troy job. Atkins is perhaps better known as an AFL and NFL player who was the MVP of Auburn's 1957 national championship team.

*Ken Cooper, the Ole Miss head coach who led upsets of SEC champion Georgia in 1976 and national champion Notre Dame in 1977, was head coach at Turner County from 1959 to 1961. He was a former Georgia player who left Turner County and became an assistant under Johnny Griffith and Vince Dooley.

*Bill Fulcher, Georgia Tech's head coach in 1972 and 1973, was head coach of Screven County (1960-61), alma mater Richmond Academy (1962)  and Waynesboro (1964-65). He was head coach of the University of Tampa in 1971 before getting the call to return to Tech.

*Frank Jones, head coach at the University of Richmond from 1966 to 1973, was head coach at Decatur from 1951 to 1956 and Cordele from 1949 to 1950. A native of Tifton, Jones led Richmond to two Tangerine Bowls.

*David Kelly, coach of Dunwoody's 1993 state championship team, jumped to college ball the next season, getting an assistant's job with Ray Goff at Georgia. Kelly has been an assistant at Central Florida since 2006.

*Erk Russell, who built Georgia Southern's program and won national titles in 1985, 1986 and 1989, was head coach of Grady in Atlanta from 1952 to 1957 and won the state title in Class AA (Georgia's largest at the time) in 1953. Russell also is widely known as Georgia's defensive coordinator for its 1980 national championship team.

*Red Sanders, the college hall of fame coach who led UCLA to a national title in 1954, was head coach of Riverside Military Academy in Gainesville from 1934 to 1937. Sanders was the originator of the phrase, "Winning isn't everything. It's the only thing." Vince Lombardi borrowed it and usually got the credit.

*Steve Shankweiler, coach of Redan's 1979 state champion, when Kevin Butler kicked the winning field goal against Marist, jumped into college coaching the next year. He is now line coach for South Florida. He returned to high schools for three seasons at Glynn Academy and Griffin in the mid-1990s.

*Buddy Nix, the current general manager of the Buffalo Bills and the head coach of UT-Chattanooga from 1985 to 1992, was head coach at Jonesboro in 1967 and 1968.

*Charlie Waller, who won state titles at Decatur High in 1949 and 1950, took a job the next season as an assistant to Shug Jordan at Auburn. Waller later became an NFL assistant and ultimately head coach of the San Diego Chargers in 1969 and 1970.

About Us

Georgia High School Football Daily is a free e-mail newsletter produced
and owned by Todd Holcomb and Chip Saye. Holcomb is a former lead high school football writer for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and co-founder of the Georgia High School Football Historians Association. Saye is a 25-year veteran of the newspaper industry who has covered high school sports for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Athens Banner-Herald, Anderson (S.C.) Independent-Mail and Gwinnett Daily News.