COLUMN: Ranking some of the high school football games I attended this year

The past few weeks, I’ve spent many column inches in this paper espousing the excitement of basketball returning in Macon.

I stand by this, but the beginning of hoops season brings with it another thing: football season, at least at the high school level, is just about over. The playoffs for GIAA will end tomorrow, and the GHSA Macon teams were thinned out in the first round last week, leaving only two squads — Westside and Northeast — still in the tourney.

It feels like it was just August, if I’m being completely honest. It feels like I only just finished all my grueling but fulfilling work on our football preview insert in the paper. It feels like there should be some regular season games left.

But alas, it’s not so. Almost every football team in Macon is in hibernation now.

Instead of trying to come up with a pithy thesis to summarize the action on the gridiron this year, I’ll revisit some of the more exciting games I covered this season in a sort of ranking of the ones I’ve attended this year, sorting similar ones into bins and shining a spotlight, if a relatively brief one, on some of the standouts.

The bottom tier: blowouts

I attended plenty of blowouts on the gridiron, as any good journalist does if they cover an entire season. These fall at the bottom of the “games I attended power rankings” because for a game to be compelling from a journalistic standpoint it must be, first and foremost, interesting.

This is not to say that blowouts are not interesting, mind you! Northeast crushing region foe Dodge County 40-19 in the penultimate game of the regular season this year was plenty intriguing, considering I’d expected it to be much tighter. So was ACE’s blowout of Southwest, an all-Macon game that I expected to be close since the Gryphons had been inconsistent at the time.

No, the bottom rungs on this subjective ladder belong to expected blowouts, typically non-region games where Macon’s A-Division I teams were slated against squads of 2A or 3A caliber — in other words, lots of season openers.

Central had to play 3A Dougherty, while Northeast was tasked with powerhouse Peach County. Both games ended up fairly lopsided, though the Central game takes the cake here — no sports journalist wants the very first game of the season to be a 44-0 snooze fest at noon.

The middle tier: compelling but relatively low-stakes

Next up are the games that have some more wrinkles to them in terms of action but come up short due to a lack of stakes.

This was Southwest’s nail-biting season opener against non-region opponent Macon County at Fort Valley, or Westside’s zany shootout with Westover out of Columbus. A turnover-fest between CFCA and Mount de Sales at Cavalier Fields also fits in this category, even though the score wasn’t too tight.

These games were back-and-forth and full of action but, since the teams were not in the same region, the outcomes of the games were decidedly less consequential.

Another resident of this category is the not-so-close game that features an explosive athlete. The best examples of this were Northeast’s dominant wins that featured running back Nick Woodford, perhaps Bibb County’s best football player.

These games aren’t as interesting on the scoreboard, but any chance to watch an incredible athlete like that makes up for any lack of intrigue or competitiveness. 

At the very top of this tier is a game like Westside’s playoff win over Spencer last week, where KD Iverson rushed for six touchdowns in about two-and-a-half quarters of play. The fact that it was a postseason contest nearly pushed it into the top level of games I witnessed this year, but the Seminoles just had the game wrapped up a bit too early.

The best of the best

Those middle tier games, impressive athletes or not, can’t stack up to the top level of games I remember most.

These are the close battles with playoff position on the line, the games with the best atmospheres, the rivalry showdowns. 

This is Northeast’s 17-7 loss in battle against Dublin in the iconic Shamrock Bowl, my third place finisher. This is ACE’s valiant effort against Dodge County that saw the Gryphons come up just one play short at the very end — that was the second-best game I saw this year.

There were plenty more that could have taken the number one spot, if only I had attended them: FPD’s amazing comeback on Tattnall to win the region championship, CFCA and Windsor’s interesting rivalry clash and the clutch one-point clutch wins over Bleckley County by ACE and Southwest all come to mind.

The top game I saw this year, however, was actually also one of the first few I watched. The opener between traditional Macon rivals Westside and Howard takes the cake, folks.

This game had all sorts of unique factors to it, most prominently the fact that it was delayed about five hours total — it was stopped twice! — by lightning. When the two sides finally met in battle, it was a back-and-forth thriller that made the wait worth it.

Howard controlled the game early, but the Seminoles roared back. Neither team’s expectations were formed yet since it was Game 1 of the season, making each play like a new discovery of a team’s talent.

There were penalties, there were long runs for touchdowns. Perhaps most importantly for my rankings, though, there was something no other game I watched this year had: overtime! Iverson, who would go on to have a record-setting season, rushed for the game-winning touchdown for Westside to cement an instant classic.

I’ll miss football, but those are some of the most enjoyable games I went to this year. I hope my coverage of them did a good job representing that… and I hope there are a few more great games left in the tank as the playoffs wrap up.