This week's bizarre high school football score

I looked at the team and its stats. It's literally a one-man show. Their QB tried 3 passes and 2 of them were intercepted in last week's loss. They ran it 50 times last week and Knox had 48 of those carries (yet with only 3 TDs).

Two thousand yards in 5 games is impressive at any level, but I'm sure if Walter Payton got 48 carries in his prime he'd be around 432 yards too.

 

I will say, 35.2 carries per game promises to have some impact later in his career.

It's hard with some of these kids, to know how legit they are on film. When he's beating a DB to the corner and then running right through his angle, is the cornerback that slow or is he fast?

Because what I've seen on YouTube, he's blowing past secondaries pretty consistently.

 

From what I can tell, Oil City has an enrollment of 655, which would make it a small 4A in Texas. Not huge but not tiny either, and I can rattle off a dozen schools in Texas of that size that are some tough customers.

Ever since I saw "All the Right Moves" as a kid, I've always had a passing fascination with Pennsylvania HS football.

 

Forget about career. To concern troll for a second here, that kind of work load just seems outright unhealthy, even if he is a strapping young lad. Looking at MaxPreps, their first four games went 58-24, 55-6, 52-20 and 64-0, followed by 21-20. There's zero justification for him to be carrying the ball that much in the first four games. (Strategically, maybe that fifth game either - Crazy that he averaged 9 yards a carry, yet they only scored three touchdowns and lost.)

 

Oil City is up in the northwest corridor of the state. Venango County has very little to offer outside of Edinboro University ... and that's one of the schools being merged into a three-campus conglomeration -- PennWest -- along with Clarion and California (Pa.). Pretty bleak.

In the admittedly small sample size I've had of the team thus far, it would seem that the coach is remarkably unencumbered of the notion of protecting his athletes or clearing his bench.

 

So ..... Compiler?

 

I publicly hold my nose at running up big scores. And yet, the one thing I seem to wind up saying more than anything else on the subject is at some point, the onus is on the losing side to get better.

And I'll admit I have a fascination with big-number games that borders on strange. First 400-yard game I saw was only about 15 years ago -- Shady McCoy as a freshman at Harrisburg Bishop McDevitt.

I've seen situations where a certain HS runner just can't be tackled by a terrible opponent. This Oil City lad DID get stopped off and on. He'd just bust a 70-yarder on every third carry.

 

Pennsylvania junior Ethen Knox believed to be the first running back in high school football history to top 2,000 yards in five games - MaxPreps

 

I took the liberty of looking up Ethen Knox's track times from the 2022 regional athletics meet at Slippery Rock. He didn't make state but he ain't slow either.

Track & Field, Cross Country Results, Statistics

 

A specialist, just 100 and 200. Sixth and ninth places in District 10-AA don't exactly knock me over, but he was a sophomore.

 

All I (and anyone else) see are measurables. At 6-1 and 190 he has good size. Football speed is completely different from track speed, so I'll leave it at that.

This might excite some on this board: