Last Friday’s match up between Breathitt County and Middlesboro is what high school football is all about…a big crowd, two excellent teams, two marquee coaches, and much at stake. Of course I would’ve loved to have seen the Bobcats come out on top, but nonetheless, the game was very exciting to watch, win or lose.

You’d love to win all of them, but if you did, you wouldn’t have had the atmosphere which blanketed Mike Holcomb Stadium Friday night. The distinct, all too real, possibility that your favorite team might lose makes winning all the better, and of course, losing, a stark reality.

Some fans remarked that Middlesboro continued to run the same play over and over, with much success. They seemed surprised that the Bobcat defense couldn’t stop them. In other words, you know what they’re going to do, so why not just stop them from doing it? For those fans, allow me to express a few thoughts.

First of all, both teams know what the other is going to do. They’re very well-scouted and little that the other does catches anyone by surprise. Winning or losing comes down to execution. It’s simply good football. I’ll do what I do best until you stop me. Very rarely does a good football team win because it outsmarts the other team. It wins because it out executes the opposition.

As in any sport, it’s not how many great plays you have that determines wins or losses; it’s how great you can execute a play that will ultimately decide the outcome. I recall a few years ago on the road when an opposing fan yelled out to his team trying to defend against Justin Haddix and the 2002 Bobcats. “Be ready, he’s going to throw the ball!” Okay, what other mysterious revelations can you conjure up? Of course he was going to throw the ball. The Bobcats knew it; the other team’s players knew it; the other team’s fans knew he was going to do it; even I knew he was going to throw the ball.

I DON’T KNOW JACK SQUAT, but if you could stop a team simply by knowing what they were going to do, then coaches would forego the repetitious process of fine-tuning their schemes. They would develop hundreds of plays, seldom running the same one twice.