High school etiquette question

This came up in a game I covered last night, although none of the coaches said anything afterwards.

Team A dominates Team B in the first half, racking up 30-point lead.

In the second half with a running clock on mercy rule, A pulls its starters. B doesn't have much depth at all, so they can't really do that. They score twice and give up once, leaving the lead at 24 points. Team B recovers a fumble around the A 40 with 3 minutes left in the game, and Team A puts its starting defense back in. Team B still marches right down on them and scores to cut it to 16 with 1 minute to go.

You are Team B's coach. Your team is down two scores with 1 minute to play, about to kick. The only reason you are this close is because Team A was nice enough to pull his starters and not embarrass you.

Do you onside kick and go for the win?

 

You go for the win.

Team A's coach needs to be confident when he puts in his backups that he can win.

As a track coach, I know only to put in my junior varsity lineup after my team has scored 69 points, or I have a significant amount of points with some studs coming up.

If I pull my varsity runners too early, or I miscount, that's my own damn fault. I don't expect the other coach a break because I underestimated his/her runners.

 

You never wholesale change.

Team A should have worked in reserves with the starters, then in time he or she would of had all the reserves in.

Although scoring 16 points in one minute is next to impossible.

 

I'm thinking of what Herm Edwards would say.

 

Yeah. It's a moot point. No way a team can score twice in a minute with a running clock.

 

You have to go for the win there, but do so knowing that Team A's coach will run the score up on you next time he gets a chance to do so.

 

If I'm the coach who has the big lead, my mentality is "we'll stop trying to score if you guys will."

I don't think a 30-point halftime lead is necessarily safe, not with all the crazy clock-stoppage rules in high school football.

I'd leave my starters in for most of the third quarter, maybe not my quarterback or an injury-prone star skill player, but definitely the O-line and most of the defense.

 

May not have been a running clock anymore.

Here, the running clock mercy rule is imposed when the margin is 35 points. But if the team can get it under 35 points, regular clock rules then apply.

 

You don't stop trying to score. You stop throwing passes, blitzing and running outside the tackles. If your backups can punch it up the middle for long touchdown drives, who cares? As a coach you did what you could.

 

I wish we had a running clock at 30 points here. Here it's 45 points and with the agreement of the losing coaches, most of whom are too proud to agree to it even when they're getting donkey-stomped.

 

I think you go for the win, but you forfeit your right to complain if the other team puts its starters back in and returns an interception for a touchdown, or knocks your QB down on four straight plays.

Same line of thinking with optional running clocks. If you turn it down, you can't bitch about the other team running up the score. (Once covered a game in a state where it was optional in the third quarter, mandatory in the fourth. Team goes up 42-0 at half, losing team declines running clock. Once it was 63-0 and still in the third, they took the running clock.)

 

One of the most consistently irritating/enraging topics in sports is the responsibility of the winning team not to hurt the losing team's feelings in blowout games.

Once Coach A cleared his bench with the 30-point lead, he had done all he needed to do (probably more). Once Team B narrowed the margin to 3 touchdowns (24 points), Coach A was completely within all rights to bring back anybody and everybody he wanted to.

Not only is Coach B completely and fully within his rights to onside kick, if I am Coach A, I'm a little insulted if he doesn't. You do everything you can to try to win, on every play. You pay the opponent the respect of your best effort.

All of the various holding-down-the-score tactics the hand-wringers always demand of winning coaches (benching all of your even marginally-decent players, stalling, making no attempt whatsoever to score, starting scrubs if the game appears to be a mismatch) have one thing in common:

They are all variations of point-shaving.