Friday Night Football
September 23, 2016
There continues to be among high school athletic administrators a great gnashing of teeth over encroachment of televised college football on the Friday night turf that long tradition reserves for high school football games. Little by little and year by year, college games drift to all times of the day and all days of the week, and Friday night is no longer hallowed ground for the high school game alone.
The Friday night intercollegiate fare remains mostly irrelevant games by second tier teams, but televised nonetheless because of the overabundance of production entities and networks seeking live sports events. But high school leadership is right to be on guard.
Known to very few people is a million dollar offer in the 1970s by then NCAA Executive Director Walter Byers to the National Federation of State High School Associations if it would not oppose televised college football games on Friday nights. Clifford Fagan, then executive director of the National Federation, declined the offer from his good friend; and the mutual respect these two men enjoyed brought an end to the negotiation.
Then, as now, the National Football League was prohibited by law (part of its anti-trust exception) from televising games on Friday nights and Saturdays from mid-September through mid-December where the broadcast would conflict with a live high school or college game. Under Byers, and until the NCAA lost control of intercollegiate football broadcasting as a result of a legal challenge by what was then called the College Football Association, college football leadership voluntarily gave high school football the same deference on Friday nights that the NFL did under federal law.
Today, major college football is such a ravenous revenue beast that it will schedule play at any time on any day in any location, televising every game – on college conference-controlled networks if the matchup is not attractive enough for national or even regional broadcasts. The Friday night high school football tradition can expect to be trampled as college football swarms and grunts around the feed trough like hungry hogs.
King Eager to Begin Next Championship Pursuit Following Familiar Leader Patrick
By
Keith Dunlap
Special for MHSAA.com
August 22, 2024
DETROIT — To many around the state, it was a collective gasp and curiosity as to how the Detroit Martin Luther King football program would move forward.
To those within the King program itself, it was a collective shoulder shrug and “we’ll be fine.”
Days after a 26-20 loss to Mason in a Division 3 Semifinal last fall, King saw longtime head coach Tyrone Spencer leave to take the same job at East Kentwood.
It was no small loss, given Spencer had guided the Crusaders to one Division 2 and three Division 3 championships over eight seasons.
Not long after, longtime assistant Terel Patrick was named the new head coach for King. But even he was still processing what happened.
“A little bit of shock,” Patrick said of his initial reaction. “Every year, there were people trying to gauge whether he would or not leave. It wasn’t new that people were interested in him because he did that good of a job. But he always said no. With him saying yes, it kind of shocked me a little bit.”
But after the initial shock, it became business as usual for one of the top programs in the state.
Spencer certainly didn’t leave the cupboard bare in terms of the elite blue-chip talent the program usually enjoys, and there was about as much continuity in a coaching transition as one could hope.
All of King’s assistants stayed with the program, and Patrick said 14 are graduates of the school. Patrick has been on King’s staff since 2009 and called the continuity within the coaching staff a “unique situation.”
“Spence was always in charge of the defense, and I was always in charge of the offense,” Patrick said. “The biggest thing for me was that I had to relearn a different side of the football.”
To do that, Patrick spent the offseason at clinics and in phone conversations with defensive experts he knows. “Just to pick their brains and see what they think in certain situations,” he said.
Patrick shouldn’t be too concerned about picking up any new defensive acumen, given it helps to have supreme talent as always.
Senior defensive ends Xavier Newsom and Willie Fletcher, Jr., are highly-rated college prospects and considered among the best players in the state. Newsom said because the coaching staff remained mostly intact after Spencer left, there was no need to reassure the rest of the team and others that everything would be OK.
“We didn’t have to do that,” he said. “We still had Coach TP, so it’s not like we got a whole new coach. We told everybody that the program is still going to be the same. Nothing is going to fall off.”
King also should be loaded on offense, with sophomore quarterback Darryl Flemister coming off a terrific freshman year as the starter. He is already on the radar of prominent college programs.
Junior running back Michael Dukes rushed for 925 yards last year as a sophomore, while shifty senior slotback David Calmese is also back.
“The biggest thing is keeping the main goal the main goal,” Calmese said.
The coaching change certainly wasn’t enough to change the expectations of others within the Detroit Public School League. The Crusaders were picked to win the Blue division ahead of rival and fellow state power Detroit Cass Tech.
In addition to still being talented, King will be plenty motivated after not making it down the street to Ford Field last year thanks to the Semifinal loss to Mason.
“We’re not used to losing,” Newsom said. “Seeing us fall short, it definitely made us hungry.”
Keith Dunlap has served in Detroit-area sports media for more than two decades, including as a sportswriter at the Oakland Press from 2001-16 primarily covering high school sports but also college and professional teams. His bylines also have appeared in USA Today, the Washington Post, the Detroit Free Press, the Houston Chronicle and the Boston Globe. He served as the administrator for the Oakland Activities Association’s website from 2017-2020. Contact him at [email protected] with story ideas for Oakland, Macomb and Wayne counties.
PHOTOS (Top) Detroit Martin Luther King’s Xavier Newsom awaits the next play during last season’s Detroit Public School League Blue championship game at Ford Field. (Middle) First-year Crusaders head coach Terel Patrick speaks during PSL media day Aug. 1. (Top photo by Olivia B. Photography; middle photo by Keith Dunlap.)