Robservations – Coffee leads to cough-ups for Pioneers

Major League Baseball used to have a great slogan: ‘Baseball Fever ‘ catch it!’

Well after last week, Pioneer football could use a catch phrase of its own.

‘Pioneer football ‘ hold on to it!’

Even seven days removed, last week’s gut-wrenching loss to Coffee County still feels like a bad dream.

Those fumbles on the kickoff, fumbles on first down and interceptions couldn’t have been for real, could they? Surely that was some sort of Hollywood script, with someone filming the Bad News Bears, gridiron style, wasn’t it?

Sadly, it wasn’t. And by the time the surreal 48 minutes of football had been completed, the capacity crowd at Nunley Stadium that so recently had been full of chatter after four straight wins was suddenly speechless.

But the strange tale doesn’t end there, sports fans, as those of us who followed another group of Pioneers to face another group of Red Raiders soon found out.

Tuesday afternoon, the middle schoolers from Warren County headed south to face a Coffee County Middle squad which was chomping at the bit to avenge last year’s regular-season and bowl-game losses.

And revenge was exactly what the junior version of the Red Raiders got, as they cruised to a 32-0 victory.

But what was the key to Manchester’s success on Tuesday? Try a pair of fumbled kickoff returns and two interceptions.

Scary, isn’t it?

In fact, it makes me wonder just what it is about Coffee County that makes Warren County players cough up the football. Is it an allergic reaction to red and black uniforms? Is it a Pavlovian response to the word ‘Raiders.’

I think some experiments are in order. Maybe we should call in the Mythbusters, and have them place a Warren County jersey on their crash-test dummy and put a football in his hands. Then, they can walk past the dummy wearing a Manchester uniform, and see if the ball pops out.

Sure it’s crazy. But so is coughing up the ball 11 times, in two games, on two different levels, against the same town’s teams.

‘ One more note about the middle school’s latest loss, and then we’ll mercifully put that blowout to bed.

It’s clear there is some animosity between the Red Raiders and Pioneers on the middle-school level. It apparently stems from last year’s regular-season game, where the boys from Coffee County came up short on what they felt was a bad call on a 2-point conversion run by the Pioneers.

So, as we’ve said, they were rearing in the stable when the Pioneers came calling for the 2007 rematch.

But from where I was standing ‘ and you can see a whole lot from where I was standing ‘ it looked like Coffee was attempting to rub it in the faces of the Pioneers. Especially in the fourth quarter, when ‘ after getting the ball back with under 3:30 to play on an interception ‘ they tried everything they could to tack on one last touchdown, even attempting a pass into the end zone and rushing to the line to get off one last play as the final horn was about to sound.

My opinion and a buck will get you a cold Sundrop, but in my opinion that was an alarming lack of class by the CCMS program which I would bet won’t be soon forgotten by the Pioneers.