The Bigger the Margin, the Bigger the Problem for Coaches Who Are : RUNNING IT UP

Coaching a high school football team that is losing by 40 points is tough, but try coaching the team that is winning by that margin.

Coaches say those who win by large margins have just as much anxiety about the score as the losers.

Initially, it seems a blowout is every winning coach’s dream because he can relax during the game, play his reserves and keep the starters healthy.

But such wins can be frustrating. Simply put, coaches want to win, and win big, but not so big that the opponent is embarrassed or accusations of running up the score are made.

“In high school football you’re starting to get what I call the ‘Nebraska mentality,’ ” Long Beach Poly Coach Jerry Jaso said, referring to the University of Nebraska’s penchant for winning by large margins.

“You’ve got USA Today doing national prep rankings and Cal-Hi Sports (Magazine) doing state rankings, so a lot of coaches feel they have to run up big scores to be considered successful.

“That’s not what high school sports should be about.”

So what’s a winning coach to do?

Well, often it means telling the rival coach--if he’s talking to you--that you weren’t trying to win that big. Often it means defending your victory to reporters--even when they don’t ask.

But running it up is relative, which clouds the issue. A 28-0 lead against a perennial power such as Edison is not as safe as it would be against a weaker school.

“What constitutes a safe enough lead to pull the starters out of the game?” Fountain Valley Coach Mike Milner said. “Every coach has seen teams come back and score 30 points in the second half, so if you pull your starters too early, you could lose the game. It’s a tough question for a coach.

“I’ve heard it said that if you get up four (touchdowns) on somebody, you pull your horses, but even that’s not a hard and fast rule.”

Said Costa Mesa Coach Tom Baldwin: “Hey, we were up 20-0 the other night (against Corona del Mar) and lost the ballgame. Twenty-0! Next time we happen to be up 20-0, or 28-0, or maybe even 45-0, I’m not going to pull my starters, because our kids need their confidence built up and our program needs a big win for the prestige.

“Now, when I coached at Santa Ana in 1960s and we had (future NFL star) Isaac Curtis, the situation was different. In 1967, Curtis didn’t play in the second half of seven of our nine regular-season games because we had such big leads. Can you imagine his statistics if we would have kept him in?

“Heck, one time that team beat Newport Harbor, 52-0, and Curtis had something like 15 yards in 3 carries. Some coaches today don’t play it that way in trying to rack up big stats for their players against lesser opponents.”

Coaches hate to be considered poor winners, and yet it inevitably happens with lopsided scores. Losing coaches, often in frustration, criticize a winning coach for passing in the fourth quarter or trying to score when the game is out of reach.

And ill will results from such contests. For example:

- After losing to Edison and Fountain Valley by a combined score of 94-0 in 1984, Karl Gaytan, then-Ocean View coach, said he thought the teams were running it up on him. (Today, as coach of Edison High of Fresno, Gaytan has a milder view on those defeats).

- Last season, Newport Harbor beat Laguna Beach, 68-27, because Mike Giddings, then-Newport Harbor coach, thought the Artists were playing dirty. And Giddings and Cedrick Hardman, then-Laguna Beach coach, were friends from their days with the San Francisco 49ers.

- Capistrano Valley played its starters for much of the game in a 63-13 victory over Laguna Hills in 1982 because Capistrano Valley Coach Dick Enright was angry about what he said was dirty play from Laguna Hills.

- Earlier this season, Banning tried an onside kick against Long Beach Poly late in a game that Banning won, 35-0. “I have no comment on that,” Jaso said.

- Last weekend, Huntington Beach Coach George Pascoe questioned Mater Dei’s Chuck Gallo after the Monarchs’ 20-0 victory as to why the Mater Dei reserve quarterback was passing at the game’s end. Pascoe later said there are no ill feelings between the coaches.

So, if winning big causes so much anxiety, why do it? Why not tell your team not to score, to sit on the ball?

Coaches say there are three reasons some teams try to win by a wide margin. First, revenge for having suffered a similar defeat in a season past; second, to stop a team from playing dirty, and third, to improve rankings with impressive victories.

Said Capistrano Valley’s Enright: “We’re a passing team, and I think after most coaches scout us, they understand that that’s how we move the football. It’s not fair to passing teams to say that you have to run the football after you’re up 30-0.

“I mean, if we have to run the ball, then a running team like Oklahoma should have to pass the ball once they get a big lead.”

Enright is one coach, who, perhaps because of his experiences in college coaching, takes a businesslike view of such circumstances.

“First of all, I can talk about it because I just got beat 48-7 (by Saddleback), OK?” Enright said.

“If they’d have beaten us 60-7 I wouldn’t have gotten mad because they played great and we just stunk up the field. It’s not the other coach’s job to keep the score down--that’s my job and the job of my defense, but not every coach sees it that way.”

When on the winning end of big scores, Enright has resorted to kicking field goals on first down when the offense got inside the 10-yard line so as not to embarrass the opponent.

“When I was coaching at Oregon, we had to play Oklahoma at Norman and we got beat 63-3,” Enright said. “Chuck Fairbanks was their coach then and he apologized for the score after the game, but what could he have done? We started 13 freshmen so their third string was better than our first string.

“Another time when I was an assistant at Oregon, we were losing to UCLA, 40-21, at the Coliseum with four minutes to play in the game, and we rallied to win, 41-40. We got the winning touchdown pass from Dan Fouts, who was a sophomore then, with 11 seconds to play. So what lead is safe?”

Fountain Valley’s Milner said that younger coaches, those in their 20s, are more likely to pour it on when they’re winning and to take it personally when they lose big than a veteran who is used to coaching’s ups and downs.

Said Gaytan, the former Ocean View coach: “I was 26 years old in my first year as a head coach at Needles in 1980. We got beat in our homecoming game, 42-0, by Trona High, and it was our first loss of the season.

“After the game, one of our kids went home and committed suicide. Just blew his brains out with a shotgun. Now, a football game wasn’t the entire cause of it--he’d had other emotional problems--but that game was the straw that broke the camel’s back, that’s for sure.

“It really came as shock because he was a popular kid a school, dating the homecoming queen, the whole works, then something like this happens.

“Ever since then, I’ve been sure to take more time with my teams after a big loss, to tell them that the coaches still loved them and that we’d get them next week. I almost got out of coaching because of that incident, though.”

Most agree with Long Beach Poly’s Jaso:

“If the other team is playing great and we’re playing poorly and we’re getting beat by a big score, fine, we’ll take our lumps,” Jaso said. “Just don’t rub our noses in it, is all.”