Coach who you like and what's the line?
By Erik Brady, USA TODAY
Once upon a time, if a Texas high school football team were on the verge of a 50-year-old state record for consecutive wins, the Big Game would come against another team from Texas.
That kind of thinking is so 20th century. Southlake Carroll will go for its 50th consecutive win — Abilene won 49 in the mid-1950s to set the Texas record for big schools — against Miami Northwestern, Florida's finest team. And the game will be played not on a high school field under Friday night lights, but Saturday on national cable (ESPNU, 7 p.m. ET) at Southern Methodist University's Ford Stadium, where organizers expect more than 20,000 fans.
PHOTO GALLERY: Images of Southlake Carroll and Miami Northwestern
At a time when games between regional high school powers often pop up on national cable TV, Carroll-Northwestern is a matchup on another level. Carroll is No. 1 and Northwestern No. 2 in USA TODAY's Super 25 rankings of the nation's top high school teams. It's just the third time in the list's 25 years the top two teams will play and the first time they come from different states.
Rashid Ghazi of Paragon Marketing Group, the game's matchmaker, says it's the most high-profile made-for-TV high school game since LeBron James played basketball for Akron (Ohio) St. Vincent-St. Mary on ESPN2 in 2002.
Saturday's game in the Dallas area will be between teams from different worlds.
FIND MORE STORIES IN: Miami | Texas | Florida | Quarterback | Miami-Dade County | Southlake | Northwestern University | Easterling | Miami Northwestern
Carroll, 1-0 this year, is an 89% white school in an affluent Dallas suburb; 1% of its students get free or reduced-price lunches. Northwestern, 2-0, is a 93% black school in Miami's Liberty City neighborhood; 67% of its students get free or reduced-price lunches.
"We come from a little bit different backgrounds," Carroll running back Tre Newton says. "But I think once we step on the field, football is football. No matter if you're rich, poor, black, white or whatever."
The schools do share a key characteristic: They are defending champions in states where high school football is king. That makes their game "like a Super Bowl for high schools," says former all-pro guard Nate Newton, Tre's father, who helped the Dallas Cowboys win three Super Bowls.
The game also will be played against a backdrop of controversy: There are questions about whether such hyped, intersectional contests are a good idea for high school students. And Northwestern nearly had its season canceled after a scandal that led to the dismissal of last year's coaching staff.
Critics contend "Super Bowls" for secondary schools place too much pressure on players while taking visiting teams too far from home. Dallas and Miami are separated by 1,108 miles, three states and one time zone.
Such intersectional games "are anathema to the ethics of high school sports," says Jack Roberts, executive director of the Michigan High School Athletic Association.
Michigan is one of a few states that place stringent limits on out-of-state games. Its schools can compete in contiguous states but otherwise are limited to 600-mile round trips. The same rules apply to visiting teams.
"We are opposed to national-scope competition," Roberts says. "I don't believe there is such a thing as a national high school championship in any bona fide sense of the word — nor should there be. So (Saturday's game) will be of little interest to the schools and towns and people of Michigan."
Most states allow such games with approval from the state associations of the competing schools and from the National Federation of State High School Associations. "Our only role in the sanctioning process is coordination between states," national federation spokesman John Gillis says. "Each state association is self-governing."
Elliot Hopkins, the national federation's director of educational services, says, "We view these games as educational, and most of our members do as well."
Carroll played Shreveport (La.) Evangel Christian Academy last season at home in a game set up by Paragon, which has been a key player in increasing made-for-TV high school football and boys basketball games. Paragon arranged two such games in 2002-03 and has boosted its offerings each year, up to 26 this school year.
Paragon is separate from ESPN, but "they bring us the matchups. … They are our eyes and ears," says James Brown, ESPN senior vice president of new programming development.
Saturday's game "is the biggest we've done since the original LeBron game," Paragon's Ghazi says. "And it's the biggest football game we've ever done, absolutely."
When it comes to arranging games, Carroll has its own restrictions: It's not willing to leave Texas.
"We won't travel because we just don't have to," coach Hal Wasson says. "We get great competition right here."
Northwestern, which will play outside Florida for the first time, left school at midday Thursday. Players will miss 1½ days of school.
"This gives our students the opportunity to fly on a plane, stay in a hotel, and we will use it as a learning experience," says Charles Hankerson, Northwestern's new principal. He says players will make up all of the work they miss.
The team plans to visit the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza on Friday to learn about the Kennedy assassination. Marcus Forston, a defensive tackle for Northwestern, says just eight of the school's 55 players have flown before. "This is life for us," he says of football.
Northwestern gets no money from the game, but all of its expenses for a traveling party of 80 are paid, Hankerson says. Carroll keeps 10% of the proceeds from tickets it sells, athletics director Ronnie Tipps says. He's unsure how much money that will mean, but it will be much less than Carroll typically makes from a home game.
Players on both teams are excited about the chance to prove they're the best.
"If they're going to tag us the No. 1 team in the nation, then we have to practice like it and play like it and act like it," Carroll quarterback Riley Dodge says.
"It's time for them to lose," Northwestern quarterback Jacory Harris says. "We want to beat them to show the whole word we're really the No. 1 team in the nation."
If the winning team wins the rest of its games, chances are it will win a mythical national championship.
"When two states get together and collide, that's the real test," Northwestern's Forston says. "It won't be opinion and going by the media. This is going to be a fact."
A cloud over Northwestern
Beneath the ballyhoo, a criminal case haunts the game.
Sunday will mark one year since Antwain Easterling, then a senior running back at Northwestern, had consensual sex after a game with a freshman on the floor of a school bathroom. He was 18; she was 14.
School authorities failed to notify police when they learned of the incident weeks later, even though they assured the girl's mother that they had, Miami-Dade County State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle says.
Police learned of the incident during a chance encounter between officers and the girl's mother in a doughnut shop in December, according to a Miami-Dade grand jury report. Easterling was charged with lewd and lascivious battery on a minor two days before the state championship game Dec. 9.
School district policy for a felony arrest required Easterling to be suspended for 10 days or expelled. However, the grand jury report says, a decision was made at the district level to allow Easterling to play in the title game anyway. He rushed for 157 yards and a touchdown in Northwestern's 34-14 win against Altamonte Springs Lake Brantley at Dolphin Stadium.
Ghazi says Paragon got a verbal commitment from Northwestern to play Carroll after Northwestern completed its 15-0 season.
"Once Miami Northwestern had the run they had last year," he says, "we thought getting the big-school Texas state champ to play the big-school Florida state champ would be a huge matchup."
Fernandez Rundle believes there is a connection between Northwestern's path to the showdown with Carroll and the alleged cover-up of the incident involving Easterling.
She thinks then-Northwestern principal Dwight Bernard did not report the incident to protect Easterling and to help Northwestern win the state championship and therefore preserve its chance to play Saturday's TV game.
"I think there is something immoral about that," she says.
Ghazi says it did not work that way: "Given the talent Northwestern had coming back, we would have signed them even if they had lost" the state title game. "We have done that (several times) before."
Fernandez Rundle's office indicted Bernard in June on two charges of official misconduct for failure to report the incident.
Michelle Delancy, Bernard's attorney, did not return calls but released a statement at the time of his arrest that said "the legal process will substantiate his innocence."
Bernard's tentative trial date is Oct. 9.
In July, Miami-Dade schools Superintendent Rudy Crew, who also did not return calls, suspended 21 Northwestern employees as a result of allegations they knew about the Easterling incident and failed to report it. They included football coach Roland Smith and his staff.
Crew said he considered suspending Northwestern's football program for a year but put it on probation instead. Otherwise, Paragon would have been left scrambling to find another top team to play Carroll with little more than two months before the game.
Easterling entered a pretrial diversion program for young first-time offenders, which included 26 weeks of counseling. He now is a freshman on Southern Mississippi's football team; he did not play in the season's first two games.
The grand jury report said school officials "allowed for the glory of football to trump the needs and safety" of a 14-year-old.
"Priorities were chosen and the little girl lost."
'Perfect City' vs. Liberty City
Northwestern practices on fields adjacent to the school and plays home games on publicly owned fields it shares with other schools.
Carroll practices in an indoor facility on campus that the NFL's Cowboys have borrowed on occasion. Carroll plays at a modern off-campus stadium. For state playoff games at the Cowboys' Texas Stadium, Carroll has drawn triple the crowd expected Saturday.
A cover story on Carroll football in the current issue of D, a glossy city magazine in Dallas, is headlined "Welcome to Perfect City, USA." The story recounts how "the football team can't lose, the schools take top honors and the neighborhoods all look too good to be true."
Northwestern does not take top honors academically. It gets an "F" rating from the state of Florida. The grand jury report that examined the Easterling case alleged the school has been more interested in athletics than academics.
Today, new principal Hankerson, new football coach Billy Rolle and many others at Northwestern are vowing to change that image. Student-athletes are required to attend tutoring sessions and meet higher academic standards.
"The grand jury wouldn't really know anything about what goes on at Northwestern because they're never out here," quarterback Harris says. "They don't see the good things. They always preach about the bad things. That's basically like deteriorating us because now we're looked at as a bad school. And we're trying to change that."
Laurence Axtell, who teaches African-American history at Northwestern, says the school's academic failings have more to do with institutional racism in the way education is funded in this country than with failings on the part of many of its teachers and students.
"We're a powerhouse of athletic talent, and we shouldn't be punished for that," Axtell says. "People say, 'Oh, you're an F school, the one with that sex scandal.' Yes, but we're also the oldest continuously open, historically black high school in Dade County. That says something. It's very disheartening to have to defend yourself to people who don't know anything about you."
A 'great contest'
Rolle, who won a state championship at Northwestern in 1998, was set to coach Miami Central this year before the call came to return to Northwestern. He had to quickly rally players who were disappointed at losing their longtime coaches.
Carroll also has a new coach. Wasson succeeded Todd Dodge in January, after Dodge was hired to coach nearby at the University of North Texas. Dodge's son, Riley, is Carroll's senior quarterback.
Carroll is 80-1 since it moved up into the division with Texas' largest schools in 2002. The only loss was by one point in the 2003 state final. In Carroll's first season in Class 5A, coach Dodge's senior quarterback was Chase Wasson, Hal's son.
"And now I'm turning it over to Hal, and my son is his senior quarterback," Todd Dodge says. "So let's see what this Wasson-Dodge duo can do."
There are some ties between Carroll and Northwestern. Nate Newton and Rolle played football together at Florida A&M and remain close. Newton says they talk on the phone a couple of times a month and text-message each other almost daily.
"I was going to invite Billy up to see this game," Newton says. "Then it turned out he was coaching it."
"Nate thinks this is going to be a 'great contest,' " Rolle says. "In college, those were the choice words we would use before big games. And that's what this game is: a 'great contest' for the world to see."
Sizing them up
Southlake Carroll
Miami Northwestern
2,653
Enrollment
2,424
1%
Eligible for free or subsidized lunch
67%
Dragons
Nickname
Bulls
Green and white
Colors
Blue and gold
16-0, state champs
2006 record
15-0, state champs
Spread
Offense
Spread
Protect the tradition
Motto
Books before football
QB Riley Dodge, RB Tre Newton
Star players
QB Jacory Harris, DT Marcus Forston
Sources: greatschools.net, www.dadeschools.net and clashofchampions.com
Posted 20h 32m ago
Once upon a time, if a Texas high school football team were on the verge of a 50-year-old state record for consecutive wins, the Big Game would come against another team from Texas.
That kind of thinking is so 20th century. Southlake Carroll will go for its 50th consecutive win — Abilene won 49 in the mid-1950s to set the Texas record for big schools — against Miami Northwestern, Florida's finest team. And the game will be played not on a high school field under Friday night lights, but Saturday on national cable (ESPNU, 7 p.m. ET) at Southern Methodist University's Ford Stadium, where organizers expect more than 20,000 fans.
PHOTO GALLERY: Images of Southlake Carroll and Miami Northwestern
At a time when games between regional high school powers often pop up on national cable TV, Carroll-Northwestern is a matchup on another level. Carroll is No. 1 and Northwestern No. 2 in USA TODAY's Super 25 rankings of the nation's top high school teams. It's just the third time in the list's 25 years the top two teams will play and the first time they come from different states.
Rashid Ghazi of Paragon Marketing Group, the game's matchmaker, says it's the most high-profile made-for-TV high school game since LeBron James played basketball for Akron (Ohio) St. Vincent-St. Mary on ESPN2 in 2002.
Saturday's game in the Dallas area will be between teams from different worlds.
FIND MORE STORIES IN: Miami | Texas | Florida | Quarterback | Miami-Dade County | Southlake | Northwestern University | Easterling | Miami Northwestern
Carroll, 1-0 this year, is an 89% white school in an affluent Dallas suburb; 1% of its students get free or reduced-price lunches. Northwestern, 2-0, is a 93% black school in Miami's Liberty City neighborhood; 67% of its students get free or reduced-price lunches.
"We come from a little bit different backgrounds," Carroll running back Tre Newton says. "But I think once we step on the field, football is football. No matter if you're rich, poor, black, white or whatever."
The schools do share a key characteristic: They are defending champions in states where high school football is king. That makes their game "like a Super Bowl for high schools," says former all-pro guard Nate Newton, Tre's father, who helped the Dallas Cowboys win three Super Bowls.
The game also will be played against a backdrop of controversy: There are questions about whether such hyped, intersectional contests are a good idea for high school students. And Northwestern nearly had its season canceled after a scandal that led to the dismissal of last year's coaching staff.
Critics contend "Super Bowls" for secondary schools place too much pressure on players while taking visiting teams too far from home. Dallas and Miami are separated by 1,108 miles, three states and one time zone.
Such intersectional games "are anathema to the ethics of high school sports," says Jack Roberts, executive director of the Michigan High School Athletic Association.
Michigan is one of a few states that place stringent limits on out-of-state games. Its schools can compete in contiguous states but otherwise are limited to 600-mile round trips. The same rules apply to visiting teams.
"We are opposed to national-scope competition," Roberts says. "I don't believe there is such a thing as a national high school championship in any bona fide sense of the word — nor should there be. So (Saturday's game) will be of little interest to the schools and towns and people of Michigan."
Most states allow such games with approval from the state associations of the competing schools and from the National Federation of State High School Associations. "Our only role in the sanctioning process is coordination between states," national federation spokesman John Gillis says. "Each state association is self-governing."
Elliot Hopkins, the national federation's director of educational services, says, "We view these games as educational, and most of our members do as well."
Carroll played Shreveport (La.) Evangel Christian Academy last season at home in a game set up by Paragon, which has been a key player in increasing made-for-TV high school football and boys basketball games. Paragon arranged two such games in 2002-03 and has boosted its offerings each year, up to 26 this school year.
Paragon is separate from ESPN, but "they bring us the matchups. … They are our eyes and ears," says James Brown, ESPN senior vice president of new programming development.
Saturday's game "is the biggest we've done since the original LeBron game," Paragon's Ghazi says. "And it's the biggest football game we've ever done, absolutely."
When it comes to arranging games, Carroll has its own restrictions: It's not willing to leave Texas.
"We won't travel because we just don't have to," coach Hal Wasson says. "We get great competition right here."
Northwestern, which will play outside Florida for the first time, left school at midday Thursday. Players will miss 1½ days of school.
"This gives our students the opportunity to fly on a plane, stay in a hotel, and we will use it as a learning experience," says Charles Hankerson, Northwestern's new principal. He says players will make up all of the work they miss.
The team plans to visit the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza on Friday to learn about the Kennedy assassination. Marcus Forston, a defensive tackle for Northwestern, says just eight of the school's 55 players have flown before. "This is life for us," he says of football.
Northwestern gets no money from the game, but all of its expenses for a traveling party of 80 are paid, Hankerson says. Carroll keeps 10% of the proceeds from tickets it sells, athletics director Ronnie Tipps says. He's unsure how much money that will mean, but it will be much less than Carroll typically makes from a home game.
Players on both teams are excited about the chance to prove they're the best.
"If they're going to tag us the No. 1 team in the nation, then we have to practice like it and play like it and act like it," Carroll quarterback Riley Dodge says.
"It's time for them to lose," Northwestern quarterback Jacory Harris says. "We want to beat them to show the whole word we're really the No. 1 team in the nation."
If the winning team wins the rest of its games, chances are it will win a mythical national championship.
"When two states get together and collide, that's the real test," Northwestern's Forston says. "It won't be opinion and going by the media. This is going to be a fact."
A cloud over Northwestern
Beneath the ballyhoo, a criminal case haunts the game.
Sunday will mark one year since Antwain Easterling, then a senior running back at Northwestern, had consensual sex after a game with a freshman on the floor of a school bathroom. He was 18; she was 14.
School authorities failed to notify police when they learned of the incident weeks later, even though they assured the girl's mother that they had, Miami-Dade County State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle says.
Police learned of the incident during a chance encounter between officers and the girl's mother in a doughnut shop in December, according to a Miami-Dade grand jury report. Easterling was charged with lewd and lascivious battery on a minor two days before the state championship game Dec. 9.
School district policy for a felony arrest required Easterling to be suspended for 10 days or expelled. However, the grand jury report says, a decision was made at the district level to allow Easterling to play in the title game anyway. He rushed for 157 yards and a touchdown in Northwestern's 34-14 win against Altamonte Springs Lake Brantley at Dolphin Stadium.
Ghazi says Paragon got a verbal commitment from Northwestern to play Carroll after Northwestern completed its 15-0 season.
"Once Miami Northwestern had the run they had last year," he says, "we thought getting the big-school Texas state champ to play the big-school Florida state champ would be a huge matchup."
Fernandez Rundle believes there is a connection between Northwestern's path to the showdown with Carroll and the alleged cover-up of the incident involving Easterling.
She thinks then-Northwestern principal Dwight Bernard did not report the incident to protect Easterling and to help Northwestern win the state championship and therefore preserve its chance to play Saturday's TV game.
"I think there is something immoral about that," she says.
Ghazi says it did not work that way: "Given the talent Northwestern had coming back, we would have signed them even if they had lost" the state title game. "We have done that (several times) before."
Fernandez Rundle's office indicted Bernard in June on two charges of official misconduct for failure to report the incident.
Michelle Delancy, Bernard's attorney, did not return calls but released a statement at the time of his arrest that said "the legal process will substantiate his innocence."
Bernard's tentative trial date is Oct. 9.
In July, Miami-Dade schools Superintendent Rudy Crew, who also did not return calls, suspended 21 Northwestern employees as a result of allegations they knew about the Easterling incident and failed to report it. They included football coach Roland Smith and his staff.
Crew said he considered suspending Northwestern's football program for a year but put it on probation instead. Otherwise, Paragon would have been left scrambling to find another top team to play Carroll with little more than two months before the game.
Easterling entered a pretrial diversion program for young first-time offenders, which included 26 weeks of counseling. He now is a freshman on Southern Mississippi's football team; he did not play in the season's first two games.
The grand jury report said school officials "allowed for the glory of football to trump the needs and safety" of a 14-year-old.
"Priorities were chosen and the little girl lost."
'Perfect City' vs. Liberty City
Northwestern practices on fields adjacent to the school and plays home games on publicly owned fields it shares with other schools.
Carroll practices in an indoor facility on campus that the NFL's Cowboys have borrowed on occasion. Carroll plays at a modern off-campus stadium. For state playoff games at the Cowboys' Texas Stadium, Carroll has drawn triple the crowd expected Saturday.
A cover story on Carroll football in the current issue of D, a glossy city magazine in Dallas, is headlined "Welcome to Perfect City, USA." The story recounts how "the football team can't lose, the schools take top honors and the neighborhoods all look too good to be true."
Northwestern does not take top honors academically. It gets an "F" rating from the state of Florida. The grand jury report that examined the Easterling case alleged the school has been more interested in athletics than academics.
Today, new principal Hankerson, new football coach Billy Rolle and many others at Northwestern are vowing to change that image. Student-athletes are required to attend tutoring sessions and meet higher academic standards.
"The grand jury wouldn't really know anything about what goes on at Northwestern because they're never out here," quarterback Harris says. "They don't see the good things. They always preach about the bad things. That's basically like deteriorating us because now we're looked at as a bad school. And we're trying to change that."
Laurence Axtell, who teaches African-American history at Northwestern, says the school's academic failings have more to do with institutional racism in the way education is funded in this country than with failings on the part of many of its teachers and students.
"We're a powerhouse of athletic talent, and we shouldn't be punished for that," Axtell says. "People say, 'Oh, you're an F school, the one with that sex scandal.' Yes, but we're also the oldest continuously open, historically black high school in Dade County. That says something. It's very disheartening to have to defend yourself to people who don't know anything about you."
A 'great contest'
Rolle, who won a state championship at Northwestern in 1998, was set to coach Miami Central this year before the call came to return to Northwestern. He had to quickly rally players who were disappointed at losing their longtime coaches.
Carroll also has a new coach. Wasson succeeded Todd Dodge in January, after Dodge was hired to coach nearby at the University of North Texas. Dodge's son, Riley, is Carroll's senior quarterback.
Carroll is 80-1 since it moved up into the division with Texas' largest schools in 2002. The only loss was by one point in the 2003 state final. In Carroll's first season in Class 5A, coach Dodge's senior quarterback was Chase Wasson, Hal's son.
"And now I'm turning it over to Hal, and my son is his senior quarterback," Todd Dodge says. "So let's see what this Wasson-Dodge duo can do."
There are some ties between Carroll and Northwestern. Nate Newton and Rolle played football together at Florida A&M and remain close. Newton says they talk on the phone a couple of times a month and text-message each other almost daily.
"I was going to invite Billy up to see this game," Newton says. "Then it turned out he was coaching it."
"Nate thinks this is going to be a 'great contest,' " Rolle says. "In college, those were the choice words we would use before big games. And that's what this game is: a 'great contest' for the world to see."
Sizing them up
Southlake Carroll
Miami Northwestern
2,653
Enrollment
2,424
1%
Eligible for free or subsidized lunch
67%
Dragons
Nickname
Bulls
Green and white
Colors
Blue and gold
16-0, state champs
2006 record
15-0, state champs
Spread
Offense
Spread
Protect the tradition
Motto
Books before football
QB Riley Dodge, RB Tre Newton
Star players
QB Jacory Harris, DT Marcus Forston
Sources: greatschools.net, www.dadeschools.net and clashofchampions.com
Posted 20h 32m ago
