MORGANTOWN — For the record, John Bowers was never a fan of talking about high school football state records.
Not as a head coach at Morgantown High in the early 2000s and not even now as the school’s athletic director.
“I was always one who very much wanted the focus on a team or a group rather than an individual,” he explains. “Now, I always understood that having a collective of athletes who are having success would lead to team success, but I was always more comfortable keeping my focus on the group.”
It’s with this in mind we’ve got to tell you this story.
It’s 2006, and Bowers had just led the Mohigans to undefeated state titles in 2004 and 2005, meaning MHS had a 28-game winning streak. The state record at the time was 36, set by Ansted High in the 1970s.
MHS needed to rattle off nine wins in 2006 to break the record, and so some snot-nosed sports reporter — me — sat down with Bowers in the MHS coaches’ office back in August to talk about the run for the record.
“Why can’t anyone just ask about the next game?” Bowers replied, throwing his hands up in the air, as pens, pencils and whistles went flying off his desk. “Everyone wants to talk about records. No one wants to know about the game.”
The Mohigans were upset by H.D. Woodson (Washington, D.C.) in the opening game of the 2006 season, thus ending the record run.
Flashing back to the current day, “Yeah, that one ending up biting us in the rear end,” Bowers said.
As much as Bowers disliked talk of individual records, his entire coaching career was surrounded by them.
As an MHS assistant coach in the late 1990s, he was a witness to former standout Chris Yura’s assault on state touchdown, rushing and scoring records.
As the MHS head coach in 2004, former standout Spencer Farley broke Yura’s touchdown record, setting the state mark of 54, which still stands today.
It is with this in mind that Bowers was maybe the perfect candidate for our next question: Is it still possible, under the current clock rules in West Virginia prep football, to break a state record.
For starters, the rule in this state is once a team goes up by 42 points in the second half, the clock doesn’t stop unless the opponent closes the score under that margin. If a team is up by 35 points at any time in the fourth quarter, that too would institute a running clock.
There was no such running-clock rule in West Virginia when Bowers was coaching.
“I certainly understand the reasoning for it,” he said. “I mean, you never feel good about going out there and embarrassing someone. That’s not what high school athletics are about.”
But now, in the case of a talented team or an individual, situations could arise — depending on the number of blowout games that are involved — the amount of playing time could be severely decreased by today’s rules compared to those who set state records in the previous seasons.
“Just based on the number of literal minutes played, I would say it would be nearly impossible to break most of the current records,” Bowers said. “That does become a big question. I mean, we can talk about being fair to the teams on the losing side, but there is another side to the story.”
The ultimate argument is put forth to Bowers that it becomes a question of doing what’s right for the masses as opposed to an individual.
Let’s take the case of former Nitro standout J.R. House, who set just about every state passing record during his prep career in the 1990s.
Is it really just his name in the record book? Well, he threw to some talented receivers who also set their own records.
Don’t you think the offensive linemen for Nitro back then didn’t take a tremendous amount of pride in protecting House so he could throw all of those passes?
And what about the Nitro community as a whole? Do they still not take great pleasure in the show that the Wildcats put on back in the day?
“It’s definitely not just one guy that goes into breaking a record,” Bowers said. “That is a heck of a quandary there. If someone were to ever come along in this state who was talented enough to break J.R. House’s records, it would be a real shame if he never had a true opportunity to do so.”
Don’t get Bowers wrong, he said he’s in favor of the running-clock rule.
“I do like the rule, but on the other hand, I do see a lot of pros and cons to it,” he said. “To me, the question becomes: Realistically, how do you justify it all? How can you justify keeping a kid in the game just to go after some records?”
That’s sort of the way we posed our final question to Bowers.
If another J.R. House did come along, would it be right for a school to do something such as letting opponents score to never get in a running-clock situation?
In a way, that was how former Nitro coach Robert “Little” Burdette handled the original House situation. Back in the day, once Nitro had a big lead, Burdette played out his bench players on defense.
The other team would score, and House, who was also chasing national passing records at the time, would get the ball back sooner on offense.
“I could definitely see situations like that,” Bowers said. “Little Burdette was way ahead of the curve, you could say.
“You let the other team keep scoring, so you get the ball back and get to play an entire game. I think you’ll start to see that a lot.”
