Giving thanks for the Tigers
Malakoff's uncommon run continues
Boy, I missed Malakoff football.
Don't get me wrong. I've enjoyed covering the Athens Hornets the past three years and watching Coach Zac Harrell build his program. The record doesn't reflect how much progress the Hornets have made in their change from a Wing T to a Spread offense. The improvement will start showing up in the record very soon, I believe.
But the Tigers are something special. Year after year, Malakoff fields a team that goes deep in the playoffs.
This will be the fourth consecutive year the Tigers are playing at Thanksgiving. Just think about that for a second. Four straight years of winning at least two playoff games.
To put that into perspective, from 1939 to 2008, Malakoff had three playoff wins.
From 2009 to today, the Tigers have 21 playoff wins.
So what changed in 2009? Malakoff hired a young guy to be the new head coach of the Tigers, an offensive coordinator named Jamie Driskell. The new coach had a pedigree but had never run his own program.
Driskell will be the first to tell you that he wasn't the only new face in 2009. Defensive Coordinator Brent Watkins has been here this entire run as well and OL Coach Scott Lane came not long afterward.
I was blessed to be on the sidelines of nearly every game those first 10 years and watched that coaching staff build a program that is known around the state.
That first year, Driskell took a team that was a combined 1-19 the prior two seasons and turned them into a playoff team.
He completely ran off the Kerens Bobcats, who in the early 2000s was dominating the Tigers. Kerens never beat Driskell. I can still remember the smile on longtime school board member Homer Ray Trimble's face after beating Kerens that first year. Eventually, the Bobcats stopped playing the series.
The coaches adapted to their roster. One season they would play very fast and take advantage of their athleticism, another season they would go slower and be more of a power team. Some years the offense was the engine driving the Tigers, some years it was the defense.
But whatever the strategy, it's always highly successful.
So as Malakoff gets ready to play an important football game on yet another Thanksgiving weekend, I hope Tiger fans realize how amazing this 13-year run has been.
It's something to be thankful for.
Thank you to Benny Rogers, the keeper of stats, for the historical playoff data.
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