Mike Owens taking Tyler Lee national in tough '05 slate
Mike Owens taking Tyler Lee national in tough '05 slate
Bob West column for Wednesday, June 1, 2005
Now that he's scaled Texas high school football's highest peak - the 5A Division 1 state championship - former TJ coach Mike Owens is branching out. The Tyler Lee boss, in a bold scheduling move many in his profession might consider too risky, has accepted the challenge of playing schoolboy powers from Florida and Ohio early in the 2005 season.
Lee will host Florida private school juggernaut Hollywood Chaminade in the zero week East Texas Football Classic, then travel to Columbus, Ohio, two weeks later to tangle with Cincinnati Colerain. Colerain is the defending big school champion in Ohio, outscored its foes by a Southlake Carroll-like 40 points a game in a 15-0 season and ranked No. 5 nationally in USA Today's final schoolboy poll of 2004.
Lee's matchup against Colerain is the inaugural game in the Kirk Herbstreit Ohio vs. USA Challenge. Herbstreit is the former Ohio State quarterback who is a college football analyst on ESPN's GameDay show. Naturally, one of the stations in the ESPN family will beam the Lee-Colerain matchup to a nationwide TV audience.
Adding some luster to the Lee-Colerain clash is the fact that it's the night before the University of Texas plays Ohio State in Columbus in what will be one of college football's highlight games of the 2005 season. Throw in the likely ESPN promotional overkill on the dual Texas vs. Ohio angle, and Tyler Lee is due some serious attention.
"That's a double-edged sword," says Owens. "Colerain is pretty darned good. This is going to be like a home game for them. We could go up there and get embarrassed because I'm not really sure at this point how good we're going to be. I may live in infamy as the Texas coach that got his rear end kicked on national TV.
"But the bottom line is I couldn't say no to our kids having this kind of experience. They are flying us in on Thursday, there's a banquet that night, we play Friday night and we were supposed to attend the Texas-Ohio State game on Saturday. Unfortunately for us, TV moved the Texas game to Saturday night and we aren't going to be able to stay."
Owens' rationale on playing a team as talented as Colerain is that the Ohio champs can't be any tougher or quicker than the Lufkin team he was supposed to meet on Sept. 9. Lufkin has given Lee and everybody else, including Southlake Carroll, fits in recent years, and could easily have won a couple of state championships.
Originally, the promoters of the Ohio vs. USA Challenge wanted Lufkin to travel with Lee to play another Ohio team in Columbus as part of a doubleheader. When Lufkin coach John Outlaw said he wasn't interested, it solved two scheduling dilemmas for Owens.
Tyler Lee was supposed to have opened in Port Arthur against Memorial on zero week but was also obligated to play in Tyler as part of the East Texas Football Classic. Since Memorial had an open date on Sept. 9, and Outlaw was agreeable to substitute the Titans for Owens' Red Raiders, everything worked out nicely. So now Lufkin's headed to Port Arthur.
Lee's trip to Ohio, as you might expect, has created quite a buzz in Tyler. Colerain coach Kerry Coombs came to Texas a couple of weeks ago for a press conference announcing the Ohio vs. USA Challenge at the Tyler Area Chamber of Commerce. Within hours, Red Raider fans had booked up both available Sept. 8 flights from DFW airport to Columbus. Now they are working on Sept. 7 and Sept 9.
"It's all been positive, with the exception of a couple of letters to the newspaper from people complaining about spending taxpayer money for us to go to Columbus," Owens said. "Of course, we are not spending a cent of taxpayer money. The promoters are not only paying expenses for a traveling party of 78, but they are also writing a check to cover the gate receipts we would have taken in from the Lufkin game."
Coombs, in his remarks at the Tyler press conference, talked about the aura and mystique of Texas high school football. He said he had taken his team en masse to see the movie Friday Night Lights, so they could see what it was all about.
Ironically, after landing in Dallas on his way to Tyler, Coombs' first stop was at the home of national schoolboy champ Southlake Carroll to visit with Dragons' head coach Todd Dodge and check out the school's almost legendary facilities. Imagine the Colerain mentor's surprise when Dodge told him Owens was the defensive coordinator at the high school in Port Arthur where he was the quarterback.
Owens, meanwhile, is eyeballing a brutal non-district schedule. He opens against the Florida power in zero week, travels to perennial 5A playoff entry Waco High in week one, flies to Ohio to play Colerain in week two, then hosts a strong Euless Trinity team Lee eliminated from the playoffs last December - after losing to it in September.
"I imagine a lot of coaches out there think I'm crazy," he said. "It's like I told (Texarkana High coach) Barry Norton at the East Texas Classic press conference - I would never have considered something like this when I was his age."
Sports editor Bob West can be e-mailed at
[email protected]. His Sportsrap radio show airs Mondays at 7:05 p.m
