Cincinnati Cobra

I have always agreed with this. The argument many of my public school friends have always made was that private schools have an advantage by not being limited by a geographical school district, but geographical school districts are actually a parameter that public schools opt to place upon themselves. The only reason any public school system doesn't have the ability to open up to out-of-district students is because that public school system chooses not to. There are actually numerous public school districts in northern Kentucky, for example, that opt not to limit themselves that way and do allow out-of-district students to attend by paying tuition, which is effectively exactly how private schools operate. Holmes, Highlands and Beechwood all allow families from out of their districts to send their children to their schools by paying tuition.

Unless there is someone transferring in that nobody is talking about CCH is going to be lacking much height, aren't they? There are a lot of very good, very tall teams on that schedule for a team who may not have anyone over 6-2 or 6-3. Who's tallest on their roster? Is Bradshaw more than 6-3?

Finished at 16-16 last year, were runners up in the district and lost in round 1 of regionals. They were young and only graduated 3 from their roster. Holy Cross was also a young team and only graduated 1. Beechwood was 2-1 against HC last year and beat HC a second time in the opening round of districts. CCH will probably end up winning the 35th again this year and I'd put BW and HC on about even ground playing for district runner up. This year is more than likely going to look an awful lot like last year in the win-loss column for the Beechies.

I believe my point has been made.

Scott won't even be a speed bump in the road for Cooper in this one. I have a feeling that the last 3 or 4 seasons may have unfortunately gutted Scott and sent them in a spiral back to being the doormat of virtually all the football programs in Kenton County. Their football team dates back to the late 1970's and they've only had maybe 4 or 5 seasons out of near on 50 years of football where they were even in okay shape. If Scott was an actual person, he could teach a world-renowned master class on maintaining malignant athletic programs, and for a school Scott's size and with the demographic they serve, that is absolutely mind boggling. Holmes, Newport, and Dayton all have legitimate excuses. The money has moved out of their school districts and their schools are filled with students from low-income households, single-parent households, no-car households, and below the poverty line households. What is Scott's excuse?

It would probably take about as long as it takes the people from a certain wealthy town in Campbell County to start blaming their offensive coordinator every time their team has a loss.

I honestly expected to see a little more out of Newport than this. Was their whole team healthy and playing?

Beechwood 28-8 over Dixie. Boone's freshmore team played Ryle on Tuesday evening and lost 35-12.

I started reading the BGPreps Mr. Football Watchlist a few years prior to joining the site. I have never noticed any bias against including private school kids. And I would dare say there are more private school kids from Louisville who are included on the list year to year than private school kids from any other area of the state. One thing I definitely have noticed is fans chiming in and saying, "I can't believe the disrespect against the kid from the school I follow," when somebody they like is left off the list. But claiming that there's disrespect or disregard for an entire set of schools from a specific region is certainly a new one. Looked up the stats on Connor Hodge. Looks like he's an okay runner and not a bad passer at all. If you plug his stats into a NFL passer rating calculator, he's a 128.18 quarterback. Clay Hayden rates as a 122.67 quarterback against what is comparably a slightly stronger schedule than CAL has had. Brady Atwell (a private school kid, FYI) rates as a 125.31 passer and he's definitely a stronger running QB than Hodge with more rushing yards on fewer carries than any other QB on the list. Kade Elam rates as a 145.78 passer. Luke Pennington (another private school kid) rates as a 139.41 passer. My guess is that they couldn't have a whole list made up of quarterbacks so they had to draw the line somewhere. Their judgment call scratched Connor Hodge. Sorry that offended you. For what it's worth, they mentioned 3 private school kids on their list of 10. Out of about 200 football programs in the state there are what, maybe a dozen of them that are private schools? So privates represent 6 percent of the football programs in Kentucky and private school kids represent 30% of the people on the BGPreps watchlist. Food for thought.

I have a good feeling it's going to be a long night and a long drive home for the Knights.

If you want to talk about football coaches really getting whacked by the Park Hills Mafia then the coach you should actually be talking about is DB and not DW. DB had parents run him out on a rail after only 2 years. DW's job was done after 6 full years when the athletic director got sick of everybody and their brother knowing that DW was out interviewing for every open coaching job in the tristate area while he was simultaneously crying to the AD about how his football team's annual double-loss to Highlands was only because his players just wouldn't buy in and commit to his program. And to answer your second question, in a word, no. Eviston and company are one of the best coaching staffs in the state. But that doesn't mean they have everything right. If they had everything right they probably wouldn't have been taken out behind the woodshed by Boyle County in front of the watching eyes of the entire state last December. Yes, that coaching staff wins. But since 2019, Bellevue has won the exact same number of state championships as CCH.

Anyone who doesn't think coaches will absolutely put their toughest, fastest and hardest hitting kids in as many head-on situations as possible against a 2-way starting quarterback doesn't have a clue how 1A football works in Kentucky. They wanna wear that kid out as soon as they can. And making sure your best players are making contact with him early and often is the nest way to wear him out. That said, Covington Catholic is a 4A program and not 1A. With as many kids as Eddie Eviston has on his roster and something like 4 or 5 kids originally going out for the QB job, are they really so hard up for QB talent that Eviston just can't help but pick the kid who's also starting safety? And why does Eddie take so darn long each time he has to pick a new starting quarterback? At this point it seems like he's being troubled more by his own indecision than he is by having a quarterback battle on his hands. Seems like there's a set of maybe a dozen or so regular conversations or topics you can hear going around football crowds and the NKY sports newsmen come about August of each year. In the last 10 or 15 years three of the most consistent of those conversation topics are wondering when CCH will pick a starting quarterback, talking about how bad the CCH special teams look, and talking about how much the CCH defensive backfield needs work. This August has been no different from any other.

Beating Purcell Marian shouldn't be any major point of pride for Beechwood. They are perennially a bad team. Even in a very good year like last year, they're only mediocre at best. First off, Purcell graduated about two-thirds of their starters from last year. And then if you think their schedule last year was tough, then you should educate yourself more on what a good schedule in Cincinnati looks like. They beat Bacon, who is struggling and is in the midst of a major down-cycle, and the only moderately decent football I see on their schedule was Taft, who they lost to. For reference, Calpreps puts Purcell's team last year fairly on par with Dixie Heights. And again, that was a banner season for Purcell. They may be a physically larger school than Beechwood, but Purcell students are about 60% on vouchers and almost 100% on free/reduced lunches. If Beechwood isn't capable of handlig Purcell, then Beechwood fans should really be concerned about where there football program stands.

Beechwood will undoubtedly be one of the top educational campuses in Kentucky when the current project finishes. From the aspect of athletics on campus, though, I would say Beechwood only ranks among in the top quarter of schools in the state. Quite a few schools in Kentucky have better athletic facilities. The highest tier schools have on-campus pools, and I'm not sure how many of those there are in Kentucky or the Cincinnati area, but they're definitely few and far between. Beechwood does have a lot of things in terms of athletics, including a fieldhouse and turf baseball and softball fields, but their athletic stadium has no track, the stands are frequently overflowing during games, and the press box is woefully small. From an all-around campus standpoint, give me Cincy St. X or Louisville X over Beechwood's campus any day of the week. And even without pools on campus, I would rank the McCracken Co, South Warren, Douglass and Great Crossing campuses all above Beechwood's.

I have heard Elder graduate Jay Volker's name mentioned by several GCL know-it-alls plus a former Lakota school district administrator when it comes to the future direction of high school football in southwest Ohio. Based on wages, alone, anyone at Beechwood who isn't prepared for Volker to head back across the pond eventually is burying their head in the sand.

I'm not making the argument that there isn't any significance to athletics. If that were the case I never would have coached a day in my life. But as someone who played football from pewee league through high school and was on the track & field team for all of high school, I never hung out with anyone from either team, nor did I have any groomsmen from the football or track team, and I'm 99% positive the head coaches never knew either of my parents' names, much less visited them when they were hospitalized. I have been on a charity board with one teacher I had and on various committees with two other teachers. Point being, your experience was that your football coach was a great guy. My experience was that mine was just okay, but my experience was that my teachers were much more important to my life. And there are significantly more students in a high school who are impacted directly by teachers than there are students impacted directly by any one football coach or basketball coach. I'm glad you liked your coach. That's cool. But math is more important than football.

If money is apparently no object, since we're talking about buying out retirements here, then CCH should look across the river to the Director of Player Development at UC. It seems like having an alum coaching at least one of their athletic programs would be a nice touch.

Football is far more important in the grand scheme of things than math? There are 400-some-odd kids at CCH who don't play football or basketball. My guess is most of those kids couldn't give two hoots about who's coaching the teams. Their math teachers, though, that may matter a little more. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that math is a lot more important to their grand schemes than high school football. What is it that they say, something like, "The first step is admitting that you have a problem"? From my perspective the reason why you can so readily find so many CCH grads from the 1990s who are opting to send their sons to Holy Cross, Ryle, Beechwood, Cooper and St. Henry is because of that precise attitude. People hear "Covington Catholic" and they don't think "great high school." Instead they hear it and they think "athletic department that happens to have a high school attached to it." The administrators at CCH could really do to put their ear to the ground and listen every once in a while to what their community of alumni really thinks about the way they are running things. They frankly might pick up a little bit on the bevy of folks who were starting to quietly wish the Rowe regime was a thing of the past.

It is Coach Morris' wife. I've got to think this situation is directly related to his retirement out of the blue. My first big question is whether or not Coach Morris was the one who decided to retire, or if that call was made by the school/school district. I know I would feel ill at ease about having someone whose spouse stole over $10K from her place of work being one of my employees. I'm curious to know how the theft took place and what the total amount she stole was. Any financially solvent business is going to realize pretty quickly when $10K+ goes missing all at once. And any spouse with much of a clue about their family's finances is gonna notice their bank account getting a big shot in the arm like that. How is Coach Morris supposed to reasonably cast away doubts that he knew his wife's theft? Is it possible that she was theoretically taking $20 a day from petty cash for like two years and finally got caught?

Dixie will need to rewrite their defensive scheme after Brach Rice's graduation. Brach's position coach told me that he accounted for 20% of the team's solo tackles in 2023. He actually told me they graduate all of their top four tacklers who accounted for right around half of their solo tackles last year. On offense they get quarterback Armani Gregg back for his senior season. That means the top rusher for the team is coming back in addition to their #2 and #3 rushers. Those three account for half of Dixie's offensive yards last year. They do have to replace their top two receivers, but Dixie seemed like they had a bounty of solid recievers last season. I'm clueless as to what graduation does to their offensive and defensive lines, though. I don't know much about HC Patrick Burke, but I've liked seeing how he's turned Dixie into that pitbull program in Edgewood. I'm really interested to see how he reboots this season.

Sam is really good people. Here's hoping he can bring back that old school swagger to Holmes and teach the young Dawgs how to really play with a chip on their shoulder. Everyone around the Ninth knows the Ninth is better when Holmes is better.

Even during the times when Dayton has been the absolute pits of high school football in Northern Kentucky, their old stadium seemed like such a hostile environment and the kind of place where you really had to be ready to strap it on when you came to play a game as a visitor. I've always envied programs like Dayton, Bellevue, Newport and Ludlow who had stadiums steeped in all the history they had. Their teams walked onto the field knowing they were standing on the shoulders of giants simply with the action of stepping onto their home field. Even if their players don't feel that today, I can't help but feel that part of that history will be completely lost once Davis Stadium falls to the progress of time. It's hell growing old, isn't it?

I'd love to see a list of the schools that have had finalists over the years. CCH with thirteen winners out of forty-five. Ryle, Beechwood and Highlands with five winners per. Ryle has only existed as a school since '91 or '92, and as much as HHS and BW hang their hats on the quality of education, I'm somewhat surprised that they're as far behind CCH when it comes to winners. No winners from old school programs like Dixie and Ludlow, and none from Holy Cross, Walton Verona or Brossart who have football programs over 15 years old. That's surprising to me, especially when these are the coaches who are voting on the award winners and not just popular vote among fans or writers. Based on the parameters it seems like the coaches agree that some schools are managing a way to do things differently with their students.

I didn't see it as being too harsh, so much as simply stating facts as facts. Dixie is a big school with athletic programs that predate those at Covington Catholic and they have never really been able to find a foothold as a local power, or even as a regularly strong performer. The CCH excuse is just an excuse. Beechwood's football program has managed to excel while competing directly with CCH for athletes. Their baseball program seems to be doing well with that too. Holmes managed to have a successful basketball program while contending with CCH for athletes from the 1950's thru the 1970's when the diocese changed up feeder schools and Covington kids were all funneled to Holy Cross. Dixie though, and particularly their basketball team, has just never figured out the formula for consistent success. So if we're talking 50+ years of throwing their hands up in the air and saying, "but how can we contend with CCH," then in my book, that's under-achievment.

This. Scott Anderson is Carroll County's athletic director and Amy Sutter is the principal. Sorry for the confusion.