One of the Best Played and Coached High School Football Games I Ever Saw @24VHSFootball @BCSTigers

Tagged under: Beyond The Keystone, Gameday Hub, News

Phil Myers | January 19, 2022

My wife and I were on vacation at Disney World and on the way home, by chance stopped in Valdosta, Georgia late on a Friday afternoon.  After checking into our hotel, I asked the clerk two questions.  Where was a good place to get supper and was Valdosta High School playing at home that particular night?  It turned out Valdosta was at home and the stadium was only a few blocks away!  (By the way, we did have a nice dinner at a nearby restaurant.)

The year was 1990.  The date was September 21^st.  The place was Cleveland Field in Valdosta, Georgia.  The two combatants were the Valdosta Wildcats and the Jess Lanier Purple Tigers from Bessemer, Alabama.  (Bo Jackson was born in Bessemer.)  I was very much excited to watch Valdosta, the winningest high school football team in America, play.  My wife on the other hand was a trooper and tagged along for something to do, although a high school football game was not at the top of her list.

The game featured two future hall of fame coaches in their respective states.  Carroll Cox was the head coach for Jess Lanier and Nick Hyder coached Valdosta.  Hyder, in fact, was probably one of the premier coaches in the country at that time.  The game was also a contrast in styles.  Jess Lanier ran the wishbone behind an offensive line that averaged 307 pounds!  That is not a misprint, the Tiger line was that big.  Valdosta ran mostly what was called a pro-set or spread for that period in time with the quarterback being under center.

Jess Lanier came out firing on all cylinders, scoring twice in the first four and a half minutes of the game to jump out to a 14-0 lead.  Both scoring drives consisted of two plays.  One of the touchdowns came on a simple look-in pass to one of the backs that fooled the Valdosta defense.  Cox appeared to have the perfect game plan to beat the favored Wildcats.  However, Valdosta scored on their second possession to cut the Purple Tiger margin in half.  The first quarter ended with Jess Lanier ahead 14-7.

Hyder and his staff made a couple of tweaks to their Wildcat defense, and as a result Jess Lanier’s offense bogged down after the opening two drives.  They did move the ball on Valdosta throughout the game, but only managed a safety near the end of the second quarter when the center for Valdosta hiked the ball over the punter’s head and out of the end zone.  It was Jess Lanier 16 and Valdosta 7 at the intermission.

The third quarter saw Valdosta slowly start to take charge.  They kicked a field goal about halfway in to cut the deficit to 16-10.  Then near the end of the quarter, the Wildcat QB threw long, a perfect 46-yard touchdown pass to put Valdosta on top 17-16.  As I recall the place rocked with that score.

The stadium held 14,000 people and the Valdosta side, which was a little bigger, was packed.  Jess Lanier had to travel 400 miles from Bessemer to Valdosta and their side was probably more than half full which is amazing in itself.  Therefore, by my humble estimate there were over 10,000 people attending the game that night.  Two interesting things to note are at that time Valdosta had 7,000 season ticket holders and the 1,000-member touchdown club bought Hyder a new car every year!

The fourth quarter was a chess match between the two teams and their coaches vying to get the upper hand in field position and scrapping tooth and nail to score.  In the end, Valdosta held off Jess Lanier to claim the victory 17-16 in what was one of the hardest hitting, yet clean games I ever witnessed.  The players from both squads put their all into it like the contest was a state championship game and not simply the third game of the season.

The cool thing was both schools ended up winning their respective state title games.  Jess Lanier beat Murphy 22-0 to win Alabama’s 6A class championship.  Murphy had recorded 8 shutouts that year and had only allowed 57 points in 13 games.  Valdosta beat Southwest Dekalb 31-0 to win the Georgia 4A class title.  Except for one game, SW Dekalb had cakewalked through the playoffs until they met Valdosta.

Finally, there are some interesting things to note about the two coaches.  Both coaches were Christians and taught their teams to put God first.  Hyder even taught Sunday School and once said the five most important things in life are God, family, academics, friends, and Wildcat football.  As stated before, both have been elected to their state’s sports hall of fames.  Both coached many players who went on to play football in college and a handful who made it to the pros.

Cox, who passed away in November of 2020 at the age of 70, is the winningest coach in Bessemer city school history.  He only had two losing seasons.  His teams played in probably the toughest league in Alabama and made the playoffs 14 of his 21 years of coaching.  They made the finals twice winning in 1990.  He retired in 1999 and moved to Georgia of all places.  Eventually he was hired as an assistant to coach defensive ends at Campbell High School in Smyrna, Georgia.

Hyder coached for 22 years at Valdosta before a heart attack in the school cafeteria killed him in May of 1996 at the age of 61.  He was buried in a black and gold casket (Valdosta’s school colors) and laid in state at the 50-yard line at Cleveland Field.  His record at Valdosta was 249-36-2 (overall 302-48-5).  While coaching at Valdosta he won 7 state championships, 3 national championships, 7 state coach of the year honors, and national coach of the year honor in 1984.  He still has the best winning percentage of any coach in Georgia high school football history at 85.775%.  In the 1980s he had a 125-10 overall record and was 86-4 during the regular season with the Wildcats.

Coach Hyder accepted speaking engagements around the country during the offseason.  He had two favorite sayings among many.  One was, “If you put God first everything else will work out.”  The other was something he made sure his teams knew, “I ain’t got but two rules, no horse play and do not embarrass the football team.”

It was a night and experience that I will never forget.  And to think it was all by chance.  When we left Orlando, we did not know where we were going to stop that night and we did not know if Valdosta was even playing at home that night, let alone playing a team like Jess Lanier.  To top it all off we couldn’t have known each team would win a state championship.

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