Category: Wild World of Sports || By

Some academic football coaches can inspire their students to great things year after year, like Serra's Rich Bowen, McKeesport's George Smith, or Penn State's Joe Paterno (who, as Alert Reader Jonathan points out, apparently plans to coach until he's just a floating head in a jar).

Other coaches are like Coach Chuck Flannery, our football analyst and a guest on my radio show a few weeks ago:

Listen: "Sports Parade" with Coach Chuck Flannery (3.2 MB, MP3)

. . .

Speaking of Football: Can you take one more comment on the Steelers-Dolphins game the other night? No? Well, too bad.

WKHB's Barry Banker said Tuesday morning that "all the field needed was a fence, and it would have made a nice pigsty." That's the most accurate description I've heard yet.

In retrospect, Josh Yohe's column in Monday night's Daily News seems eerily prescient.

Yohe wrote about Gateway's heart-breaking 35-34 overtime loss to Central Catholic. Central's victory was clinched when Gateway's kicker missed a point-after-touchdown.

Wrote Yohe: "I found it peculiar that one of the best kickers in the WPIAL would have missed his target ... I suspected that the infamous Heinz Field grass had something to do with (Ryan) Lichtenstein's inability to do something that he can probably do with his eyes closed."

According to Yohe, who says he snuck out onto the field immediately after the game, the turf was so muddy, wet and uneven he had trouble walking on it, even in hiking boots.

Lichtenstein "was literally kicking on a sheet of mud and water. If the Rooneys ever grow out of this old-fashioned, traditionalist crap and install some Field Turf, it's conceivable to assume that Gateway might be the WPIAL champion today."

Of course, all that happened before the Steelers laid the sod, and God brought the deluge.

And anyway, I don't know if "woulda, coulda, shoulda" will make you Gateway Gators fans (like Dr. Bob Kelso) feel any better.

. . .

On a Related Note: Some people are saying that the WPIAL games shouldn't have been played at Heinz Field in the first place, because they damaged the turf.

To quote that great philosopher, Sherman Potter, "Horse-hockey." That field was built with taxpayer money after taxpayers specifically said they didn't want to use tax money to build it. As far as I'm concerned, any public group that wants to use Heinz Field should be allowed, from the Allegheny Intermediate Unit to the Wilmerding YMCA.

Besides, other cities play their high school football championships at the local pro stadium, including in Boston. (The difference being that the Patriots' stadium has artificial turf.)

I'm not sure we should be playing high school games at a pro stadium because I don't know if I like the message it sends. We spend so much time telling student-athletes that they should get an education, then we rush to add the trappings of pro sports to their games.

The WPIAL championships used to be played at high school stadiums. If neutral sites are necessary, then maybe the WPIAL should use smaller college stadiums (like Robert Morris' and Carnegie Mellon's) or Pittsburgh city league stadiums.

Defenders will say that playing in a WPIAL championship is the only time most students will ever get to play in a pro stadium.

True. But playing high school football is the last time they'll ever get to be a kid. I know some of them --- like Jeannette's star Terrelle Pryor --- look like adults, but they're not. We need to stop rushing them out of childhood.

And we need to stop commercializing high school football like college football was commercialized decades ago.

Oh, and the Rooneys seriously need to fix that field. "Pigsty" was generous.