Friday, Saturday, Sunday in Texas Page 11

  Plano’s biggest fears had come to life, and the line of cars trying to get into the game was still piled up on East Exchange Parkway, outside of the stadium.

  “Get the ball to Brandon!” McCullough said on the headsets, trying to get his star running back involved.

  Brandon Stephens answered with a 34-yard reception that might have been a touchdown had quarterback Matt Keys had a little more time to set his feet on a wheel route out of the backfield. The pop-fly pass was hauled in by a waiting Stephens, who jaunted to the 21. Plano then got to the 12-yard line, but on second down, and Stephens somehow on the sidelines, the Wildcats handed the ball to Tarence Raymond, who fumbled it away, giving Allen possession again.

  “We can’t waste those chances, guys!” offensive coordinator Joey Stone barked at both the skill players and the offensive linemen who missed some key blocks. “Concentrate!”

  Stone shook his head in disbelief. He called plays last year in the 42–3 loss to the Eagles and knew just how difficult it was to score touchdowns against the Eagles. They had just wasted a golden opportunity.

  What he didn’t know then was that it would be the Wildcats’ only real chance to score.

  Even though Plano’s defense started rising to the challenge, forcing a missed field goal and two turnovers as play continued into the second quarter, the offense could barely block Allen’s four defensive linemen, much less generate a drive.

  Late in the second quarter, still trailing 13–0, the Wildcats got the ball to the Allen 47-yard line and faced a third-and-6. Then three blitzing Eagles hit Keys as he released the ball, attempting to throw deep down the left sideline. Allen’s Anthony Taylor picked off the pass with ease and scampered seventy yards to the end zone untouched.

  Just like that, Plano was now down 20–0. The floodgates were open. The chatter, the bounce in their step, and the waves of confidence that had started to return to the visitor’s sideline ended with a thud.

  The turnover was so shocking for the Wildcats that Keys, who had taken just about every snap to that point in the season, couldn’t shake the play out of his mind right away. In fact, he looked out onto the field and noticed something missing from the next offensive huddle—himself.

  “Oh shoot,” Keys said, seemingly forgetting that he was the quarterback and needed to be in the game. He ran out there to execute the plays, but the damage was now done.

  To make matters worse for McCullough, a little injury to insult was added just before halftime. A play spilled over to the sideline and an Allen player ran into him, smacking the coach squarely in the chest.

  “That’s the hardest I’ve ever been hit on the sidelines,” McCullough said after the game. “I felt it the entire game. Probably a pretty good bruise there.”

  Bruised egos would fill Plano’s sideline in the second half, which began with another pick-six for a touchdown on the first play of the third quarter. A fumble here, an interception there, a fumbled kickoff, the turnovers just kept piling up, reaching eight by the end of the game.

  Allen kept scoring, and kept trying. After a fourth-quarter touchdown pushed the lead to 58–0, the Eagles just had to have the ball back, calling for an onside kick, which they recovered, prompting even their coaches to get off the ground with celebratory jumps and fist-pumps.

  On the other sideline, the Plano coaches were a little surprised by the act, but not shocked. Unfortunately for them, they had been on the wrong side of these blowouts against the Eagles not just on the varsity level, but also with the junior varsity and occasionally the freshman teams.

  With Plano’s defense on the field nearly the entire second half, it could’ve been easy to drop the rope. Darion Foster didn’t operate that way. Undersized for a defensive tackle and playing his first season on the varsity, he had come too far to stop.

  He ran sideline to sideline for nearly the entire fourth quarter, even getting blindsided and knocked on his butt a few times, but he kept getting back up. Darion was in on four tackles in the final frame, even catching the attention of his uncle, whose eyes were usually fixed on the secondary.

  Eventually, the game would come to a merciful end with the Wildcats losing, 65–0, easily the worst defeat of McCullough’s tenure at Plano High.

  Mad about the lopsided score and losing for the tenth straight time to Allen, Fisher put his uncle hat on in the final seconds as he watched with pride. “I know this, my nephew is a grown-ass man—a grown-ass man. He’s never going to stop.”

  Fisher grabbed Darion by the neck for a quick hug after the game, but nothing too extreme, maintaining their player-coach relationship.

  It was one of the more uninspiring renditions of Plano’s school song afterward, the band serenading players who had their hands up to honor the school, but really just wanted to get into the locker room and put the 65-point loss behind them.

  Inside, McCullough told them to do just that.

  “Men, we can’t have this one back. It was a really tough loss, but it’s one loss. One game. If we let this loss turn into another loss down the road, I’m going to be really disappointed. That’s not who we are.”

  Usually, after the head coach talks, it’s on to the team prayer, but Keys rose from his kneeling position to address the team.

  “We have six more games guaranteed. For a lot of us, we’re not going to play football after that,” Keys said to his peers. “We’re going to have to win five or six to be where we want to be. To do that, it’s going to take everyone buying in. We can still be the team we thought we were. You have to believe that you and everyone surrounding you are talented as we are. You guys are my family for the six weeks. We have to do everything and anything we can for each other.”

  Both players and coaches were nodding their heads in approval. The bitter taste of 65–0 was hanging over their heads but Keys’ words of encouragement seemingly had a positive effect.

  The last person out of the locker room was McCullough, which is usually standard for all games, but in this case was also a result of just moving slow. His chest aching because of the sideline hit and his heart hurting even more because of the final score, McCullough was rather shocked when he stepped outside of the stadium and went up the stairs toward the buses.

  About twenty adults—some parents, some school administrators, and perhaps family and friends—were there waiting for the head coach to come through the line just as all of the players and assistants had done in the last ten minutes.

  “We’re all right, coach,” one father said with some enthusiasm. “We’ll be back next week. Get ’em ready next week.”

  McCullough shook his head in amazement. His team had just lost to a bordering rival by sixty-five points, and he was getting encouraging words from a group that even he would expect to express more frustration. The head coach was able to kiss his wife and then grab the first seat on the first bus, which was the signal for the convoy to take off.

  As he sat there during the quiet ride, the optimism in McCullough started to return. The 65–0 shellacking by Allen was less than thirty minutes old, but there was only one thought he couldn’t ignore:

  This Flower Mound team will be tough, but we just have to win.

  Saturday

  Of the ten full-time assistant coaches on Baylor’s staff, nine of them are married with children.

  Without a doubt, coaches love what they do, but their jobs are a grind. Whether or not they’ve got the bye week circled on the calendar, it’s a safe bet that their wives do.

  Of course, it’s not vacation time for all of them. Head coach Art Briles rarely got a chance to indulge in one of his favorite passions—high school football. He’d been involved with Texas high school football at just about every level, including the Class 1A ranks when he was the star quarterback for Rule High School near Abilene, Texas.

  Now, he used his time off to recrui
t. Or in this case, keep an eye on some of his committed players. Down in the Houston area, Briles went to see prized running back Kameron Martin, who not only had been fully committed to Baylor for nearly a year, but also had a massive new BU tattoo on his left arm to prove his allegiance. Getting a chance to see Martin for a few plays gave the coach time to head over to Silsbee, Texas, and check up on a bigger recruit—literally—in tackle Patrick Hudson, one of the top offensive linemen in the country.

  But it was another coach on Baylor’s staff who would find himself in the news. And for the second straight week, it was another member of the Briles family.

  Son-in-law Jeff Lebby and his wife, Staley, were able to make a friend’s wedding in Norman, Oklahoma, on Friday night. Lebby knew coaches rarely get to attend such events during the football season, but thanks to Baylor’s bye week, he and Staley jumped at the chance to return to Oklahoma, a place where he spent five years as both a player and then a graduate assistant before eventually landing a job at Baylor in 2008.

  In the weeks leading up to the trip, Lebby never even bothered to inquire about OU’s game that weekend. He knew his team was off, so the last place he wanted to be was at another stadium. But when he realized the Sooners were hosting Tulsa, a team that had just hired longtime Baylor assistant Philip Montgomery, who basically filled his entire staff with coaches who had some kind of tie to the Bears and/or Briles, Lebby called “Monty” to see about possibly meeting him at the hotel on the day of the game.

  “When he told me the game was at 11, I said, ‘Shoot, Coach, we’re going to be in town.’ He said, ‘I’ll get you two sideline passes.’ And I didn’t even think anything else about it,” Lebby recalled. “That Friday night, I talked to OU’s director of football operations and told him I was going to be there, and he said, ‘Great, we’ll see you tomorrow.’ But I seriously had no idea this was against any rule.”

  Jeff and Staley picked up their passes and made their way down to the field. They had been standing on Tulsa’s sideline for a few series of the first quarter when he got a tap on his shoulder.

  “Are you Jeff Lebby?” said a well-dressed man he didn’t recognize.

  “You’ve got ’em,” the Baylor coach sarcastically fired back.

  “I’m the director of compliance here at OU. You can’t be down here. It falls under the bylaws of scouting. You probably need to get on the phone with your compliance guy.”

  By the time he could get his phone out to call anyone over at Baylor, Lebby could see “Coach Briles” dialing in on the screen.

  “He wasn’t happy at all,” Lebby said. “And he shouldn’t have been. It was a bonehead mistake. I just didn’t realize it was an issue.”

  And to be honest, Briles wasn’t sure it was against any NCAA violation as well.

  “I was very upset,” he recalled. “I just knew it wasn’t kosher. I did not know it was an NCAA violation because it shouldn’t be. The last place you can tell anything is on a football field. If you’re going to scout somebody or take advantage, you’re not going to gain anything on the field.”

  Even though Jeff and Staley left immediately, the firestorm didn’t die down. Despite receiving an explanation and apology from Montgomery following the game, OU coach Bob Stoops fanned the flames when asked about it by a reporter during his Monday press briefing.

  “That’s not allowed,” Stoops said. “I don’t know what he was doing here.… It’s something that needs to be reported and needs to be dealt with through the Big 12 office and our people, so I’m sure they will.”

  Like Briles did with his son, Kendal, and receiver coach, Tate Wallis, for their recruiting violation, he suspended Lebby. This suspension was for the first half of Baylor’s game against Oklahoma on November 14.

  “It was an overblown incident that we punished ourselves for and moved on,” Briles said. “If it was a big deal, they’re looking for small things to make big deals out of.”

  Lebby, a graduate of OU, was disappointed, but not too surprised by the reaction of Stoops, a man who had come to his living room to recruit the former four-star lineman from Andrews, Texas.

  “Bob knew he had a chance to take a shot and took it,” Lebby said. “They had been playing second fiddle to us. He got to take a shot and he did. I expect nothing less, that’s for sure. But I was wrong, and shouldn’t have been there.”

  The irony of this story is that Stoops and the OU coaches were no strangers themselves to gaining any kind of edge—even at Baylor’s expense. In 2008, Briles had just taken over as the head coach at Baylor, which was then no match for teams like OU and Texas, as the Bears went only 4–8 in each of his first two seasons. But before Baylor’s game with the Sooners in Waco that year, word got back to the coaches that Oklahoma assistants had asked for and received faxes from the University of Houston pertaining to some of Baylor’s favorite plays, signals, formations, and so on, that Briles had actually left for the new head coach of the Cougars, Kevin Sumlin. He, of course, had come from the Oklahoma staff under Stoops.

  Briles thought of mentioning that to the media before the game, but instead, kept it under his hat. In fact, he considered it a compliment that national power Oklahoma was already a little worried about his offense and what to expect. And he knew there would come a day when Baylor would reach their level.

  In 2014, the Bears handed Oklahoma its worst home loss in the Stoops era, crushing the Sooners, 48–14, for the third win in their previous four meetings with OU.

  For that alone, the two teams’ November 14 showdown was already circled on every calendar from Waco to Norman. But the action, and then reaction, of this latest event just pushed the rivalry to another level.

  Sunday

  One way to beat the Monday morning traffic in Dallas is to get a head start on the rest of the drivers. Anything before 7 a.m. typically avoids the bumper-to-bumper routine. For the true early risers who are on the road at 5 a.m., they are privy to one of the more popular sports talk shows in the country, The Musers, on KTCK—1310 “The Ticket.” Together since 1995, the trio of Craig Miller, George Dunham, and funnyman Gordon Keith have hosted the highest-rated show in their time slot for over twenty years.

  On this Monday morning, some six hours after the Cowboys’ improbable comeback over the Giants, there was little room to poke and prod this team. Finding negatives about the Cowboys’ 27–26 win just wasn’t justifiable this morning.

  The Cowboys were supposed to have this magical response to the 2015 season and after one game, there was certainly magic in the air.

  “When this team goes to the Super Bowl this year, we’re going to look back at games like this one last night,” said one of the hosts.

  “Who knows, just maybe this will be their year,” said another.

  Sure, it was only one game into the season, but if “The Ticket” was buying in, there couldn’t be a lot of others who weren’t.

  But while the NFL is on a completely different stratosphere from college and certainly high school, the routine is the same. There is little time to waste either patting yourself on the back or dwelling on a loss. The next game is always staring the team in the face.

  But never was this more of a reality than in the Cowboys’ second game of the year.

  When the NFL released its regular-season schedule back in April, one of the first games that popped off the page was the Week 2 trip to Philadelphia, where last year’s NFL rushing champ, DeMarco Murray, had soared in free agency.

  The league’s schedule makers obviously didn’t want to wait too long for Murray to face his former team, for he had become the first player in NFL history to win the AP Offensive Player of the Year award before switching teams in the ensuing off-season.

  Had Joseph Randle, who backed up Murray the last two seasons in Dallas, not provided any juicy headlines over the summer, the reunion between the Cowboys and their
former running back still would’ve been worth watching. Randle just made it a must-see event.

  During an interview in May, Randle was asked about the possibility of winning the starting job in 2015 and replacing Murray, who had just set the Cowboys’ all-time single-season record with 1,845 yards, surpassing Emmitt Smith’s MVP season in 1995, when he rushed for 1,773.

  “He had a good year last year,” Randle said of Murray. “I got to sit back and watch a lot, and I felt like there was a lot of meat left on the bone.”

  Days later, and after a meeting with head coach Jason Garrett on being more careful with his words, Randle tried to clarify the statement, citing no disrespect toward Murray but only mentioning that his goal was to not only reach the lofty standards, but try to surpass them.

  By then, the quote had already made its way to Philadelphia, where Murray jokingly responded with a jab, saying, “Hopefully he’ll be able to taste some of that meat this year.”

  Game on.

  A month later, Randle was doing an interview with the Cowboys’ in-house Internet and TV departments, and he prefaced the sit-down by saying he didn’t want to get himself in any more trouble with his comments. After a five-minute interview in which his answers were basic and harmless clichés, Randle didn’t seem satisfied.

  As he got up to take his clipped-on microphone off his shirt, he matter-of-factly explained how he was already behind in his own personal goals since joining the NFL two years earlier.

  “I should already have two 2,000-yard seasons by now,” Randle said. “I think if I had been starting, I already would’ve rushed for 2,000 yards twice.”

  Instead, Randle had just 507 yards in 29 games played as a backup. But he was showing at least some maturity because when it was asked if he wanted to get back on camera and make that statement, he nearly did, before it was decided he was better served to hold back on those proclamations just yet. Come September 14 in Philadelphia, Randle knew he could let his on-field performance do the talking for him.

  As the players got to Valley Ranch on Tuesday, they noticed a new member of their team standing just outside the locker room. Veteran Jeremy Mincey was quick to point out, “This guy looks pretty stiff.”