#TBT: Mill Thrills Again at Silverdome
By
Geoff Kimmerly
MHSAA.com senior editor
November 26, 2014
By Geoff Kimmerly
Second Half editor
Pontiac Silverdome 25 years ago served as the stage for one of the most exciting moments in MHSAA Football Finals history, appropriately performed by an athlete known as "Mill the Thrill."
Mill Coleman, who later would star as a receiver at Michigan State University, scored on a 9-yard quarterback scramble with 1:34 to play to push Harrison even with DeWitt, 27-27. Steve Hill's extra point put the Hawks ahead to stay as they repeated as MHSAA champions.
Below is a "Finals Flashback" to that go-ahead scoring run, part of a collection of flashbacks that formerly ran during breaks at MHSAA football championship games. Click for the full box score from that game and playoff results from the entire 1989 Class B bracket.
The championship was the second of Harrison's now MHSAA-best 13. Coleman currently serves as an assistant coach for the Hawks.
PHOTO: Farmington Hills Harrison quarterback Mill Coleman looks for an opening as DeWitt's Travis Gribble works to get away from a blocker while in pursuit. (Photo courtesy of Gary Shook.)
Football Scheduling
December 23, 2014
The major complaint about the MHSAA Football Playoffs is not that too few teams qualify or too many, or that a five-week playoff is too long or should become six weeks, or that some worthy teams miss out while some less worthy teams get in. No; most people find a five-week, 11-player tournament after a nine-game regular season is the best that our late start to fall classes and our early start to winter weather will allow us in Michigan.
Many people appreciate being able to complete our 14-week season in the warmth of Ford Field on the Friday and Saturday of Thanksgiving weekend. Most people think that nearly 45 percent of 11-player schools is a sufficient tournament field. Many people like the excitement that the six-win threshold creates for teams that had been eliminated earlier from league championships.
The most serious and legitimate complaint about the season-ending playoffs is the stress it has placed on conferences and the struggles many schools have in building nine-game regular-season schedules. Some critics want to mess with the Football Playoffs because of the mess they believe it makes for regular-season schedulers.
Having the MHSAA provide every school a nine-game regular season schedule of the most nearby teams of the most nearly equal enrollments would shift scheduling headaches from the local level to the MHSAA.
I’m not suggesting that this solution to local problems doesn’t create new, large headaches for the MHSAA. But in fact, that is the tradition of school sports: when an issue is large enough in scope and common enough among member schools, the state high school association is asked to be the problem-solver. That’s how we got transfer rules, defined sports seasons and competitive cheer tournaments, for example. Just about every policy and procedure and program of the MHSAA arises from a common local problem looking for a statewide solution.
The 2014 Update Meeting Opinion Poll indicates that 70 percent of responding administrators do not favor the solution of the MHSAA making all schools’ regular-season varsity football schedules. Maybe the question should be narrowed to having the MHSAA complete member schools’ non-conference scheduling.
Meanwhile, we will keep watching as high school associations in other states move to statewide scheduling. For if scheduling is the problem, then scheduling itself needs to be the focus of the solution.