All-Area headache No. 9,283: wimping out on picks

We do 26 for all-county and all-area football (11 offense, 11 defense, a punter, kicker, returnman and all-purpose). I'll always ask coaches not for nominations, but for who we'll look stupid if we leave off. An all-state lineman, a defensive lineman who only had 50 tackles but tied up two blockers every play and is being recruited, that sort of thing.
And when it comes to all-area, we make an effort to get stats from all of our schools. But if everything is even, preference definitely goes to the ones who have called us all year.

 

That's another pet peeve.

If you're picking a high school all-star team, the selections should be based strictly on what the players do in high school competition. Who gets offered scholarships is often based on what players do at camps and on off-season club teams.

We had a kid in our area this year who is getting a ride to a Top 10 program. Rumors have it the college coaches sent down word that the kid was only to play a certain number of plays per game, only play on defense or return kicks on very limited occasions, etc etc -- they wanted to protect him from injury -- so the kid ended up playing, in effect, about half-time.

He still rushed for 1,200 yards or so, scored 15 TDs, etc., but it was about half of what he could/should have done, and his team went 6-4. But his coaches still pumped him for POY, despite there was a kid across town who rushed for 2,000 and 25 TDs and his team went 14-1. "But our guy is going to Bigtime University!!!" was the argument.

 

i hope you picked the kid who rushed for 2,000.

 

And if you cop out and pick "an athlete" be damn sure it's an athlete and not a fill in for a second quarterback, a fourth running back.....

 

All of this depends on how big your area is.

Fortunately, I pick only one all-star team, once a decade.

Unfortunately, it's 1,980 schools over a period of 10 years!

Here's the one I did six years ago.

 

Once, a co-worker was absolutely convinced that two Podunk kids deserved a share of the all-area basketball POY. I told him no way, that's a copout, we're not going to do that. So the debate goes on and on when I finally asked him who the coach thought deserved it.

Minutes later, Podunk's coach gave us an answer -- the one kid was good, but he wouldn't have been near as great without the other one to open opportunities. There was no hesitation in his answer, we got out of that one.