In a Mismatch, Even the Winners Are Losers Sometimes : Prep Football: While running up the score against a weaker opponent may provide some benefits, most coaches agree that what can be lost is more valuable.

There is no quality control in high school football. Teams are made up of whoever happens to be on campus that year, and sometimes things are very good and sometimes they aren’t.

And sometimes teams that are very good play teams that aren’t, and pretty soon you’ve got a scoreboard that reflects some algebraic mutation such as 49-2 or 56-6 or 74-0--scores of games between Orange County teams this season.

On one sideline there is a coaching staff that is embarrassed and incensed and on the other is a coaching staff that just wants it all to end and will be defensive to the point of neurosis about the score in conversations after the game.

As one coach observed, “If you lose like that, you’re an idiot; if you win like that, you’re a jerk.”

But it happens every year. It happened a month ago when Whittier Christian beat Brethren, 74-0; it happened in 1961 when Brea-Olinda defeated Capistrano Union, 75-0, and it happened in 1920 when Fullerton defeated Anaheim, 109-0.

It happens because every year unevenly matched teams are matched in games, with the results being predictable and sometimes ugly.

For the most part these things just happen no matter how much each team would prefer they didn’t. Winning coaches have been known to go to all lengths to try and keep scores down.

For years, Larry Toner, Servite’s varsity coach, was that school’s freshman coach. There were more than a few occasions when those freshman teams--ones with the likes of Steve Beuerlein and Turk Schonert--were far better than their opponents.

“I’d rip into my first stringers (at halftime),” said Toner, who didn’t want his players to become cocky. “I’d tell them how bad they looked and tell them if they thought I was going to allow them to go out there and embarrass Servite some more, they were crazy.”

And then Toner would put in his reserves, do nothing but run the ball straight into the line and hope to keep the score down. Toner’s actions are by no means unusual. Coaches do this because, in the long run, there is much more to be lost than gained from a big victory.

To be sure, there are occasions when big scores seem rather premeditated actions.

Last season, Trabuco Hills starting quarterback David Lowery was still throwing with less than two minutes left in the Mustangs’ playoff game against Yucaipa, even though Trabuco Hills won the game, 49-6. It was no secret that Trabuco Hills Coach Jim Barnett was interested in Lowery achieving big stats, hoping that the big numbers would interest a few college scouts.

In 1986, when Troy scored 56 points in the first half against Buena Park, there were more than a few who figured Troy Coach John Turek was less than happy with some negative comments Buena Park Coach Mike Barron had made about Buena Park coaches that preceded him, one of which was Turek.

It has long been speculated that Capistrano Valley’s 63-13 wipeout of Laguna Hills in 1983 had something to do with the fact that Chuck Gallo, then Capistrano Valley offensive coordinator, had been fired as Laguna Hills’ head coach the previous year.

In a 1986 Times story about that game, Gallo said: “A coach has no right to expect anything from his opponent from the whistle to the final gun. You have no right to ask the other guy to go easy on you.”

But most coaches believe very much the opposite.

“I owe the opposing coach respect if, for no other reason than he’s in the same profession I’m in,” said Bob Johnson, El Toro’s coach. “What kind of satisfaction would I derive out of beating his team like a dead horse?”

Mike Marrujo, Valencia coach, said, “I feel a responsibility to the other kids. You have to remember that it’s a kids game, played for kids. It shouldn’t turn into something they have to be ashamed of.”

One evening in 1969, Marrujo returned home from his job as a supermarket box boy to find his brother, Gary, sitting with his head down at the kitchen table. Bishop Amat had defeated Pius X, the team Gary played for, 80-9.

“I asked him the score and he told me,” Marrujo said. “I thought he was joking, but his head stayed down the whole time I talked to him and I figured out he was telling the truth. You could tell he was really embarrassed. That isn’t what high school sports are about.”

Unless a team plays in a league that has a tiebreaking provision that rewards a team for points scored, the only things to be gained from running up the score is perhaps revenge, some recognition or a confidence boost. All of which are negligible assests for most coaches.

“Things like that smack of being egotistical and statistical,” Johnson said.

And what can be lost is usually many times more valuable. Injuries occur in these games when humiliated opposing players have been known to take cheap shots or start fights as the games get out of hand.

“The possibility of retaliation is very real,” said Bruce Rollinson, Mater Dei coach. “A kid is looking for some way to salvage a little bit of his pride.”

Tom Baldwin, now at Costa Mesa, coached at Santa Ana High in the late 1960s when Isaac Curtis, who went on to play with the Cincinnati Bengals, was a star running back at the school.

Curtis averaged just 10 carries a game, sometimes playing only in the first quarter, because the result was already decided.

Kerwin Bell, another great back, averaged just 13 rushes a game for his career at Edison.

“The games were many times over by halftime,” said Bill Workman, then Edison coach now at Orange Coast College. “More importantly, we wanted him in one piece for the next game. People get hurt in games like that.”

There is also a possibility that a team, having won big, will come to believe in its own invincibility. One of the more glaring examples being an undefeated Edison team in 1981 that won its last four games by an average of 30 points, then lost to a 3-7 Servite team, 14-7, in the first round of the Big Five playoffs.

“I think that (big margins of victory) had a lot to do with losing,” Workman said.

There is the possibility that having beaten an opponent badly, that the losing team will come back to settle the score. It so happens that the Yucaipa team Trabuco Hills destroyed last season was made up mostly of underclassmen. Yucaipa is now 8-0 and ranked No. 1 in Division VIII, the division Trabuco Hills competes in.

“Lets just say there would be no problem getting up for that game,” said Jim Taylor, Yucaipa coach. “The kids have been talking about playing Trabuco Hills in the playoffs all season.”

There are times, no matter how a coach may try, that the score continues to grow.

There are simply teams that are so superior that their second- and third-stringers are better than the opponent’s first team.

Coaches are unanimous in their belief that a player, first string or reserve, ought never be told to take it easy. Players have been known to get hurt when they ease up, and coaches are repulsed at the thought of saying one thing during a week of practice and doing another during a game.

“Those kids work just as hard as the first-stringers,” Marrujo said. “It isn’t right to tell them to lay down.”

Workman was accused of running up the score on the most unlikely of stages--the 1979 Big Five final game at Anaheim Stadium. In that game against Redlands, Edison held a 14-0 halftime lead and then scored four quick touchdowns to go up 42-0. This was against a Redlands team that had allowed only 14 points in its previous 13 games.

Workman put in his reserves. Those players, excited to be playing in front of more than 20,000 people, drove against a dazed Redlands and scored again. Then, a reserve linebacker intercepted a pass and returned it for a touchdown.

“What was I supposed to tell the kid? Fall down?” Workman said.

Edison won 55-0.

A coach can try to control the game with his play-calling, usually running plays that remain inbounds, but even that can backfire when either an overzealous reserve or even an opposing coach refuses to cooperate.

In 1987, Rancho Alamitos was pounding Savanna, 54-0. Mark Miller, Rancho Alamitos coach, on a third-and-long situation, told his reserve quarterback to call a play, inferring a rush that would keep the clock running.

Instead, the quarterback called a halfback option pass that resulted in another touchdown. After the game, Miller sprinted to the opposing coaching staff, apologizing profusely.

“I yanked him out of the game right after that,” Miller said afterward. “The Savanna coach (Dana Coleman) is a really big guy. I thought he was going to kill me. I made my offensive line coach walk with me to shake hands.

“He was great about it. He understood the situation. You can’t tell kids not to score.”

Almost incredibly, many times it’s the opposing coach who brings a big loss upon himself and his team.

In a freshman game which his team was winning 24-0 at halftime, Toner called the opposing coach over before the second half and told him that Servite would run nothing but dive plays for the rest of the game and suggested the opposing coach set his defense for that.

“He got very angry, I guess I hurt his pride,” Toner said. “He refused to make the adjustment to the dive. On the first play we ran the dive for nothing. The second play we ran a dive for nothing. On third down we ran a dive that went for 80 yards and a touchdown.”

Coaches talk about eight-man blitzing fronts that force their teams to pass. Workman recalls one blowout in which the opposing team stacked eight men on the line against his third-string quarterback. The quarterback, trained to recognize such an adjustment, changed a run to a pass play at the line and threw a pass that nearly went for a touchdown.

“I’m sure I would have caught some flak if the pass had gone for a score,” Workman said. “But that’s what we practice, and that’s what the kid was taught, and he did the right thing. Sometimes those teams bring it on themselves.”

Said Toner: “The way I look at it, in those situations, we are no longer playing sport, there is no competition, so why pretend that it is sport? Let’s just get it over with.”