If you are 50 or older and grew up in North Louisiana loving sports, the light and lyrical name of Lanny James likely brings back some happy memories for you.

Lanny was a sports reporter for KNOE-TV in Monroe and, from 1974 to 1989, the CBS-affiliate’s Sports Director. His career included his Sportscope TV show and coaches shows and lots of play-by-play for high schools like Neville and Ouachita but also for Grambling, Louisiana Tech, now the University of Louisiana-Monroe (NLU then), LSU, and even the old Shreveport Steamer of the World Football League.

But what’s had me thinking about him since the day he passed away — February 2, age 82, and fittingly I was at a basketball game when I heard — was that Lanny James, with the simple and playful name and flamboyant, welcoming personality, so perfectly captured for me such an important time in my little life. I think of it, and I have to think of him.

We’d just moved to West Monroe from a tiny town in South Carolina in 1974. I’d just become a teenager, knew my cousins and that was it, and this was the biggest town I could ever imagine besides Atlanta, where we’d gone a few times to Six Flags. For a kid who grew up 43 miles from an interstate, it was overwhelming.

And there was Lanny James, in his mid-30s, young but naturally I thought he was old, anchoring the sports on television, which was at a TV station just across the river. My god!; this man was within my gravitational pull! He was like right there. I might even see him one day.

And I did. Down there on the court at NLU basketball games with Mike Rose and Calvin Natt and Jerry Jingles and other players, probably in the annual Pacemaker Classic at (then) Ewing Coliseum.

How did I know it was him? You’ve got to be kidding. A small and well-proportioned guy, filled out, tanned, full head of hair perfectly parted, open collar, a necklace or two — guess you’d call them chains? He was beautiful, is what he was. Smooth talking. “The TV Sports Guy.”

I could count on him. He entertained me. And he lived in my town. Covered my teams.

I would meet him later. He did not disappoint. Never did. He was always the same Lanny James. (It was hard to call him just “Lanny” when “Lanny James” rolls off the tongue. Seemed to fit him better. Just perfect.)

Once at Louisiana Tech after a media basketball game before a real game, he sent one of us to the store to get him some hair spray while he showered. True story. Wasn’t the least bit ashamed to ask for it either.

Not a big guy, but bigger than life to me back then.

Once I saw some TV guys hauling a big case up to a football press box. They were struggling. “What’s in the box?” I said. “Need help?”

“No,” one of them said. “It’s just Lanny.”

There is a street in Monroe called Lamy Lane. Once Lanny was picking up his daughter at elementary school and another student saw him and pointed and screamed, “Look! It’s Lamy Lane! It’s Lamy Lane!”

Honest mistake, but I love that kid. Ever since I’ve heard that story, Lanny’s been “Lamy Lane” to me.

He’s gone now and I won’t get to call him that anymore. He’d moved to Florida — loved the sun and golf — and then to Texas around Spring near Houston, and we hadn’t seen him in maybe 20 years. Which hurts me. He was a legend and fun to be around, just because he was Lamy Lane. I wish I could tell him that, and thank him for being my friend before he knew I even existed.

He’d probably thank me for the hair spray.

It’s an interesting coincidence that another local legend, Bob Griffin, passed away at age 85 on February 3, 2020, in Shreveport, almost three years to the day before his Northeast Louisiana sports counterpart. Bob’s career lasted more than 60 years and we all felt we knew him, he was on television and at the ballparks so much. And of course, the world went crazy and closed, you might remember, a month after he died, another interesting coincidence but hardly a surprise.

Lanny and Bob made their living in life’s toy department, but they didn’t take it for granted. If they were going somewhere, they took you with them, and made sure you learned something and laughed along the way. You can’t help but miss guys like that.

Contact Teddy at teddy@latech.edu or Twitter @MamaLuvsManning

Every now and then, I wish the NCAA Transfer Portal worked in real life, and I could put somebody in it and send them to another place.

Or I could get in it and send me to another place.

Sigh …

If only life were that simple.

If only the two-year-old transfer portal were that simple.

Until April 2021, the NCAA allowed student-athletes to transfer and be eligible to play at their new chosen institution after sitting out a year. But that was eliminated that Spring of ’21, nearly two years ago, when the NCAA granted its student-athletes a one-time waiver to transfer with no penalty. And with immediate eligibility.

And it has been a musical chairs stemwinder since. 

Throw in the NIL stuff, and what we’ve witnessed since is a Saturday night barn dance in fast forward.

Coaches move around. College professors and administrators move around. Even writers. Great. Players should be allowed to do the same thing.

But … there is a not-so-great side. The NCAA data, at least so far, reveals that only half of the student-athletes entering the transfer portal enroll in a different school. The other half goes to a non-NCAA school, plays another sport, quits ball, withdraws from the portal, or drops out of school.

No team. No degree.

There are students with scholarships who get into the portal, sacrifice their scholarship, and then … can’t get on a team.

There is always going to be a spot for the elite athlete. There are some players who are going to play, a lot, at any school they wish. They aren’t gambling when they enter the portal. And you’d think that most of the time, they are moving to a program that they’ll enjoy more, for any amount of reasons.

But that’s not a big number of athletes. Only a handful from the tens of thousands can play anywhere.

And some athletes made the wrong decision out of high school, again, for any number of reasons. That’s why there was a transfer rule to begin with.

Warning: a person would be dumb as a bag of ankle tape to take any advice I might have. I can share experience, but never advice. So this is just an observation.

This current bunch of college students has never really had to wait. Most of them have never heard a dial tone. Never had to wait for the newspaper to get thrown into the yard. They’ve had microwaves and most always a drive-thru. Automatic banking, one of the great inventions of modern man. Pay at the pump. Cell phone. Audio books and books online.

And all that stuff is awesome. Wonderful. I’d cry if I couldn’t fast-forward through commercials.

But we were trained to wait, just because a lot of smart people hadn’t come along yet to invent things that would allow us to wait less, (and thank you for that, Mr. or Mrs. Online Music Inventor So I Can Listen To Tom. T. Hall Whenever I Want To Person).

We knew there was such a thing as waiting. Today’s gang, not so much. Waiting your turn can be a drag, but it’s not a death sentence.

A suggestion might be to think about why you chose State U. in the first place. Revisit those feelings. Maybe school could be about more than playing time. And players get hurt. And players get better. You never know what the next wave will bring in …

What a lot of Transfer Portal People will miss is relationships you build with a coach, your teammate, the managers and trainers, your academic advisor. You don’t build any history with your professors, the custodians, the staff, the grounds crew …

For most of us, it might be worth the waiting. Sometimes it’s wise to wait. And see.

Again, only half of student-athletes who’ve entered the transfer portal have enrolled in a different school. Of all the student-athletes who signed Wednesday and in December to play football for whatever schools, you wonder where they’ll be, or be heading to, next year at this time. 

Contact Teddy at teddy@latech.edu or on Twitter @MamaLuvsManning

When Kansas City backup quarterback Chad Henne came into Sunday’s NFL Divisional Round game to replace injured Patrick Mahomes, named Wednesday NFL MVP by the Professional Football Writers Association, I thought the same thing as you.

“Chad Henne’s still in the league?”

Luke McCown, who started 10 games at quarterback during his 13-year NFL career from 2004-2016, those last four seasons backing up Drew Brees in New Orleans, was watching too. His thoughts were more along the lines of, “Lord, have mercy.”

The Chiefs led Jacksonville, 10-7, at the time. But Mahomes was headed to the locker room to get an X-ray of his ankle and Henne was taking a first-down snap from his own end zone.

On first down, Henne threw his first completion. Of the season.

Nice start.

The 37-year-old Henne and the Chiefs put together the longest touchdown drive in the team’s postseason history — 98 yards — increased the lead to 17-7 with 3:54 to go in the half, and ultimately won the game, 27-20.

Mahomes played the second half, hobbling a bit, and is expected to play when the Chiefs host Cincinnati Sunday night at 5:30; the winner plays the winner of Sunday’s 2 p.m. San Francisco at Philadelphia game in Glendale, Arizona in Super Bowl LVII Feb. 12.

Mahomes finished 22-of-30 for 195 yards and two TDs. Henne, who starred for Michigan in 2007 (seems like 1987, I swear) and has four starts in the past seven seasons, was 5-of-7 for 23 yards and a touchdown.

But it’s timing, man. If you ain’t got timing — and a really good tight end like Travis Kelce — you ain’t got nothing.

Henne, in a pinch, was gold when it counted under circumstances only guys like McCown and others in the fraternity can fully appreciate.

“You ARE the insurance in case something happens,” McCown said about the backup’s role. “You understand that. Now, can you handle the horse when it’s time to climb on?”

McCown never had to finish a game “at a moment’s notice” when the starter went down, but with Tampa Bay he did have to sub for the injured Jeff Garcia in 2007 in New Orleans and, in a game that decided the division title, threw for 313 yards and two touchdowns, the last one in the final minute, in a 27-23 win.

“That was early in my career,” he said, “so I was dumb enough not to know how much pressure I was under. Like they say, ignorance is bliss.”

And in 2015 he found out on a Friday he’d start for an injured Brees Sunday against Carolina, the league’s best defense that year, when the Saints were already 0-2. McCown finished an efficient 31-of-38 for 310 yards, but it was in a 27-22 loss; too much Cam Newton and Greg Olsen that day, if memory serves.

So McCown knows about being No. 1 and about being No. 2.

“What (Henne) did is extraordinarily hard for a couple of reasons,” he said Wednesday afternoon while picking up kids after school in his hometown of Jacksonville, Tex., where he and wife Katy, former Shreveporter and Louisiana Tech cheerleader, are raising six children. It takes a minute to round all those young ones up, so the Tech Athletics Hall of Fame Class of 2017 inductee had plenty of time to talk — and about one of his favorite subjects.

“First, you’re not getting any reps,” he said of backups. “Henne might have gotten a series with the starters Friday. But mostly you’re running scout team, so you’re running the other team’s plays, not even your own. And if they’re developing a guy — if you’re the old guy like Chad or like I was in New Orleans — that young guy might get the extra practice series with the starters.

“The second thing’s not the reads: you know that. You’ve played for years, you’ve watched film, you’ve done all that,” he said. “It’s the unknown, the emotion of the game at that moment. You can’t be shaken when they say, ‘OK, go get your helmet.’ The crowd is coming to see Mahomes or Joe Burrow, not the backup. So you want to live up to that standard. And to the standard you’ve set for yourself.”

Sunday, McCown was rooting for Henne and for backup QBs everywhere, for guys who McCown says are “worth every penny” when the football gods and fate conspire and suddenly … It’s Time.

“Maybe I’m saying it because now I’m an old backup, but the disparity in pay between the starters and backups in football, or the starting pitchers and the bullpen in baseball, it’s hard to believe,” he said. “You’ve got to have those guys. In moments like Sunday’s, what Henne did proves why you should pay to keep a good, experienced backup.”

Because once the moment is gone, you can’t get it back. You’ve got to make it happen. Right then. Henne, the latest Banner Waver and bellcow for the Backup QB Fraternity, did.

“It’s fun to see him get his due, to see anytime a backup gets his due,” McCown said. “Take any backup playing today: any one of them can out-throw any guy in college. There are what, four billion guys in the world?, and only about 64 of them can throw a goofy brown oblong ball like those guys. You’ve got to remember that these are the best football players in the world.”

The Chiefs had the right one at the right time against the hot Jags. And while he doesn’t have the paychecks Mahomes does, Henne was money Sunday. 

Contact Teddy at teddy@latech.edu or on Twitter @MamaLuvsManning.

Monday morning before his team trounced Tampa Bay, 31-14, in the NFL wild-card playoff game, Dallas kicker Brett Maher heard his alarm clock go off two hours late, hit his non-kicking toe on a Tampa Bay Hilton Garden Inn chair, got a past-due bill notice in his email, then spilled all the coffee when he opened the door on his knee.

But he really started living a sad country song once he got to the stadium. Once his team scored a touchdown.

Yay!

And once he missed the extra point.

Booo!!!

Then his team scored another touchdown.

And he missed the extra point.

Then his team scored another touchdown.

And he missed the extra point.

Then his team scored another touchdown.

And he missed the extra point.

Four in a row. For a professional kicker.

Ultimately, it didn’t matter — although don’t try to tell that to a guy who bet the over. (More on that in a minute.) But it mattered to Maher, who finally made one on his fifth try after the Cowboys’ final TD.

It mattered to everyone watching, because you couldn’t help but feel sorry for the guy. If anyone ever needed a hug …

And it mattered to kickers, who are people too, at least sort of.

“It was tough to watch,” said Jonathan Barnes, a former All-Louisiana place kicker for Louisiana Tech from 2014-17, now living and working in Ruston, where he and his wife are expecting a little kicker or cheerleader come summertime. He was almost as nervous watching Maher try to kick Monday night as he will be when wife Lauren goes into labor.

It’s a kicking brotherhood kind of thing. They really can’t help it.

“You know when he’s going out there the second time, he’s still thinking about the first time,” said Barnes, who came to Tech from Baton Rouge and is pursuing a graduate degree while he works as a realtor. “And when he’s going out there the third time, he’s still thinking about the second time …”

Since the ball was moved from the two-yard-line to the 15 in 2015, an NFL extra point has been from 33 yards: 15 yards plus 10 yards of end zone plus eight yards to hike, place and kick.

In college, it’s hiked from the two (old NFL rules), making the kick about 20 yards. Barnes was 43-of-46 as a senior, and missed just once in 137 times as a sophomore and junior.

“We do miss a kick,” Barnes said, laughing, “every now and then.”

It’s hard. And tricky.

Consider that Maher has kicked a pair of 62-yard field goals. He has the franchise record with a 63-yarder. But four times Monday, dead on, he missed four straight kicks that NFL kickers make more than 94 percent of the time.

“Ninety percent of kicking is those few inches between your ears,” Barnes said. “It’s not an ability thing with this guy; he’s got all the ability in the world. Just all of a sudden, he got out of that groove — and trying to find it again, right then, can be tough.”

The Cowboys signed another kicker this week and might activate him for the division round when Dallas (13-5) plays at San Francisco (14-4) Sunday at 5:30.

Wish I could activate somebody to cover for me. I am in a harmless but meaningful 28-person family football league. We pick against the spread and no money changes hands but feelings are often hurt. Like mine, when I went 0-for-6 last weekend.

0-for-6. Two misses worse than Maher’s historic all-time league-worst four whiffs.

You can try hard for a long time and not go 0-for-6. I’ll tell you about it sometime, in hopes maybe I can help some poor, misguided soul.

Oh, and just because favored Dallas won and easily covered the 2.5-points spread, don’t think Maher’s missed kicks “didn’t matter.” The “total,” or the over-under, the number of points both teams were predicted to score, was 45.5. They scored 31 + 14, so 45 total. That means if you bet the “under,” you were the winner because the Cowboys professional kicker missed four extra points. FOUR! If he makes just one, the “over” wins.

Except he didn’t. So if you bet the over, what you wanted to kick … was Maher. 

Contact Teddy at teddy@latech.edu

(Editor’s note: The annual National Cheerleaders Association’s High School National Championships are January 21-22 in the Dallas Convention Center, and some of you parents are going — and leaving behind a substantial amount of money. By substantial I mean “most every dollar you’ve ever earned.” If you’re a rookie, today’s throwback to January of 2011 is what you can expect. It’s dedicated to Lawrence Herkimer, a wonderful sort you’ll read about here who has since passed away — in 2015 at 89. And it’s dedicated, most definitely, to you. Go forth, make memories, and bring us victories.)

Logically, you’d think competitive sports would have been invented first. But cheerleading, in its most primitive form, was here long, long before the football, the game clock, or even Lou Holtz.

I imagine a little boy in animal hide shorts surveying the prehistoric prairie and yelling desperately, with a slight Jurassic lisp, “Run, Uncle Ugh! RUN!!!”

Final score? Saber-Toothed Tigers 1, Cavemen 0. (A good cheer can do only so much.)

Or maybe the cavemen played a game of Hides vs. Skins while cavewomen encouraged them with “a tisket, a tasket, put the rock in the basket,” back when “the rock” really was one.

Did you know that near Sydney, Australia, they’ve found fossils of pompoms made out of Wooly Mammoth hair? They haven’t, but maybe one day…Just sayin…

We do know that cheerleading was re-invented, big-time, with the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, who in 1972 eschewed the Eleanor Roosevelt quality of cheer for something a little racier. Like skin. And white go-go boots. And no “two bits, four bits” cheering.

For all practical purposes, cheer as our grandparents knew it died that fall years and years ago, thanks to white patent leather, mid-drifts, and the kinds of cowgirls Roy and Ritter and the Durango Kid sang about wistfully on those long, lonely nights on the prairie, down 10 late to the Redskins and facing third-and-long.

But that’s not the only kind of cheerleading done in Dallas today. Last weekend I was exposed to non-exposed cheerleaders, ages junior high to high school, in something called competitive cheering. This sort of thing has been going on since the 1950s or so but, like the World Football League and disc golf and the Raiders’ move out of and then back to Oakland, I missed the whole entire thing.

What I saw at the Dallas Convention Center over three days were more than 3,000 cheerleaders — 225 teams, give or take a ponytail — competing at the National Cheerleaders Association’s 30th annual championships. That’s substantial rah-rah.

My first impressions are that this is much harder than it looks, that toe-touching, basket-tossing and pike-kicking “as one” takes a lot of practice, and that estrogen as a force grows exponentially. If you are ever in the way, move, or there will not be enough of you left to scrape up and put in a shoebox.

The Ruston High team I supported (by watching, not by actually lifting anybody) won a national title and a third place. I suspect more North Louisiana schools will get in on the action; the “problem” is that it really is hard. But as with any challenge, if you give a child enough love, give them some hope and some instruction in something they really care about, kids will surprise you with what they can make happen.

Speaking of, let me offer props to the man who invented the whole competitive cheer concept. He is Lawrence Herkimer, inventor of the “Herkie” jump who, as an SMU cheerleader, organized and led a cheer camp in 1948, drawing 52 girls and one boy. The camp grew by seven times in one year. In 1986, he sold the NCA and his cheer supply company for $20 million.

With a patent on the pompom, Herkie is the man, the guy on top of the cheer pyramid.

Sunday, I saw people lined up 45-deep to buy T-shirts. Impressive.

If I were “Herkie,” I would “Rah!” my ownself. I would cheer me. 

Contact Teddy at teddy@latech.edu or on Twitter @MamaLuvsManning.

We’re a lot more liable to hear cursing instead of a prayer during a televised sporting event these days.

But ESPN analyst Dan Orlovsky surprised viewers and maybe himself during Tuesday’s edition of NFL Live on the sports network.

Orlovsky’s short prayer, 50 seconds and unrehearsed and sincere, was for Buffalo Bills defensive back Damar Hamlin, who went into cardiac arrest on Monday Night Football early in the Bills-Cincinnati Bengals game, which was postponed after Hamlin was taken to the hospital in Cincinnati.

A family member said Wednesday that Hamlin, 24, was still in critical condition but stable and improving.

He was injured while making a tackle, one that was not overly violent. Doctors have so far agreed that it seemed to be a perfect storm of where and when and how the collision occurred that caused the injury.

Players were crying. Coaches and announcers all shaken. And the phrase “thoughts and prayers” was used more than once.

Orlovsky, who quarterbacked at the University of Connecticut and was a backup for 12 NFL seasons and five teams from 2005-2015, took it a step farther. With host Laura Rutledge and former LSU All-American and Dallas Cowboy Marcus Spears joining him on the desk, Orlovsky offered what seemed like a humble, quiet explanation before praying as the three discussed the outpouring around the football world of well-wishes for Hamlin.

“Maybe this is not the right thing to do but it’s just on my heart that I want to pray for Damar Hamlin right now. I’m gonna do it out loud. I’m gonna close my eyes, I’m gonna bow my head and I’m just gonna pray for him.”

Spears said something, maybe “Amen” or “Go ahead,” and Orlovsky did.

“God, we come to you in these moments that we don’t understand, that are hard, because we believe that you’re God, and coming to you and praying to you has impact,” Orlovsky said.  

“We’re sad, we’re angry, and we want answers, but some things are unanswerable. We just want to pray, truly come to you and pray for strength for Damar, for healing for Damar, for comfort for Damar, to be with his family, to give them peace. If we didn’t believe that prayer didn’t work, we wouldn’t ask this of you, God. I believe in prayer, we believe in prayer. We lift up Damar Hamlin’s name in your name. Amen.”

Often in the locker room or on the field after practice, teams will kneel in a circle and recite the Lord’s Prayer. And often there are prayers over the PA before games. But that was a first for me, seeing the replay of Orlovsky’s straightforward, precise prayer on a news show about sports.

That moment was refreshing in its sincerity and spontaneity, and because of the very exact reason for it. We say “thoughts and prayers,” but Orlovsky actually did it, right then, for one person in one particular situation, and maybe partly for some viewers who wanted to pray for the young player but didn’t quite know how.

It reminds you of when presidents used to pray and encourage prayer (think Washington and Lincoln) and generals used to pray (Patton and Eisenhower), when Martin Luther King prayed aloud and often and for us all, and when school kids used to pray or be led in prayer.

Hopefully, Hamlin will regain his health. And hopefully we’ll all keep praying, for Hamlin and his teammates and family, for Orlovsky, for each other. Not just when one of us is hurt. But all the time. We all need the prayers, and we all need the practice.

Contact Teddy at teddy@latech.edu or on Twitter @MamaLuvsManning.

By TEDDY ALLEN, Journal Sports 

Prep football in Shreveport-Bossier this fall was the kind of season where you could score 42 and 71 points in consecutive games — and lose both.

It happened to Haughton, who made it the playoffs’ second round, in back-to-back October losses to Airline and Benton. But true to 2022 prep football form around here, the Bucs bounced back the next week to score 56, plenty enough to beat Natchitoches-Central.

Benton was the Top Dog when it came to scoring; the Tigers averaged 46 points a game this fall. Airline averaged “only” 41 but beat Benton, 75-59, in the District 1-5A lid-lifter September 23. In its 7-0 sweep of district, the Vikings averaged a robust 56 points a game. Once they got warmed up …

And so it went this autumn, a head-spinner for those of us who remember when a 35-28 game was a real barnburner.  The all-fall tale of these record offensive eruptions makes it the Shreveport-Bossier Journal Story of the Year.

It outscored some memorable contenders:

Benton’s the fall guy in a last-partial-second loss to Denham Springs;

Kason Muscutt becomes first homegrown Mudbug; 

Louisiana Downs cancels Super Derby that was never scheduled;

Mobile sports betting launches in Louisiana;

Huntington hoops advances to the Top 28 a day after the fatal shooting of a team member, led by coach Mack Jones, who won No. 700 last month;

Mikaylah Williams shines at Parkway and for Team USA, and signs with LSU;

Byrd golfer Sydney Moss wins the state Junior Amateur and Women’s Amateur titles;

Benton golfer Noah McWilliams repeats as Louisiana Player of the Year;

Calvary sweeps softball, baseball state titles;

Loyola girls’ soccer nets a state crown;

Louisiana Tech baseball makes its second consecutive NCAA regional led by a pair of Byrd High scholar-athletes, Steele Netterville and Jonathan Fincher;

LSU football wins nine games, about five more than most people thought in preseason, in large part due to Evangel products and defensive starters Micah Baskerville and Jarrick Bernard-Converse;

Dak Prescott leads Cowboys back to Super Bowl contention;

LSUS baseball rallies to reach World Series, finishes third;

Mike McConathy’s coaching career ends, then he enters politics; and most recently,

Ice-cold Radiance Technologies Independence Bowl provides last-minute drama as Houston edges ULL.

As usual, a quality year. Including the breakout campaign for Calvary’s and LSU’s Sam Burns, who scored three victories and more than $7 million in earnings on the 2021-22 PGA Tour and earned the inaugural Shreveport-Bossier Journal Sportsperson of the Year crown.

But it’s prep football on greenies that made the most noise, a kind of pinball pigskin game that has been lurking since the birth of summertime 7-on-7, the spread offense, the run-pass option, and year-around conditioning, to name a few factors.

A story by SBJ’s John James Marshall ran October 5 and began like this:

“If you took just their best single game in the last two weeks, the combination of Airline’s Ben Taylor, Huntington’s Kam Evans and Benton’s Gray Walters has thrown for 22 touchdowns and 1,429 yards. 

“What’s crazier, no one seemed all that surprised by it.”

To explain the haughty numbers, the seven coaches he talked with (none were named) offered the factors above, plus some others, like continuing to score in lop-sided games, putting the best players on offense, and the improvement in top-to-bottom coaching and ramped-up sophistication of the game, to name a few.

In our case locally, there is also the Experienced Quarterback Factor. Benton, Byrd, Evangel, Haughton and Northwood each had a third-year starter at QB. Huntington, Parkway and Shreve had a returning starter. “It’s almost cheating when you can put a quarterback on the field who can think like you do as a coach,” one of the SBJ panelists of coaches said.

Lots of skill players and an up-tempo system help too. Witness the outlier that is Airline’s Ben Taylor, who won the starting job late in summer practice and passed for 2,730 yards and 34 touchdowns; he’s a sophomore.

It was definitely The Year of the War-and-Peace Scoring Summary. Calvary averaged 44 points a game and scored 50-plus seven times. Evangel averaged 34 points a game. Haughton, Byrd and Huntington each averaged 32 points a game. Loyola averaged 38 a game in five of its six wins. Northwood scored 35 three times and 48 twice.

The most perfect example of this year’s offensive wizardry was on full display at Haughton’s Harold E. Harlan Stadium on October 21, a perfect night for football. Benton and the homestanding Bucs combined for 21 touchdowns. Every single conversion try was successful. Fifty-one points were scored in the fourth quarter.

Benton was the survivor, 78-71.

Keith Burton was the arm-weary referee. “After a while,” he said, “we just tried to stay out of the way.”

Contact Teddy at teddy@latech.edu or Twitter @MamaLuvsManning

Like they say, behind every good Shreveport Bossier Journal All-Metro Coach of the Year is a good woman.

Sometimes, that woman is eight months pregnant.

Meet Bonnie Matak Scogin, former Centenary softball standout, former Parkway High softball coach, and bride to Airline head football coach Justin Scogin, that SBJ Coach of the Year we were gabbing about.

The Scogins are also parents to son Brady, four-and-a-half years old. His little brother is due in five weeks, and yes, since both parents have playing and coaching experience, there was strategy involved concerning the preferred kickoff date.

“We wanted that three-year or four-year gap before I would have more kids,” Bonnie said. “Two kids in diapers, I mean …”

We parents know exactly what she means.

“And we definitely planned not to have another one during football season,” she said.

Sounds like Barry might have been born in …

“August,” she said. “Born in August.” She said it with a tone of relief and laughter, with the voice of someone who’d decided to take a beach vacation during monsoon season but lived to tell the story.

So, the new baby is thrilling offseason news. The football season news was thrilling too, but a different kind of birth. More accurately, a re-birth.

Scogin was hired in March to coach Airline, 1-9 last fall, and all he and his staff and their players did this fall was produce a perfect 7-0 run through District 1-5A to win the title.

That was after an 0-3 start, back when a district title was hardly expected, even from someone expecting.

“I always had faith, but I knew these things just take time,” Bonnie said. “I reminded him that someone had posted somewhere about the new ‘Scogin Era.’ Not the ‘Scogin Day’ or ‘Scogin Month.’ It’s not all going to happen in a day.”

But when it did start happening …

“Absolutely, it started to get really fun,” she said. “He tries to keep the coaching at school with the other coaches; he doesn’t talk to me much about it. But I could tell he had a lot more confidence after they started winning. Once you realize it can happen, you start thinking, ‘Hey, we can continue this.’ It just took that first time for it to happen.

“I thought it was awesome,” she said of the Coach of the Year honor, “especially for a first-year head coaching job to do what he and the staff were able to do with the program.”

It’s an honor that hasn’t gone to his head. “Most humble person you’d ever want to meet,” Bonnie said. “He always goes the extra mile for us. He’ll take Brady and go to a basketball game or baseball game (when Scogin was coaching at Leesville) and say, ‘You stay here and relax and we’ll go watch our players.’ He’s going to be there when he can to show support, but he’s still working to find ways to do it with family.”

He even spent his first day as All-Metro Coach performing the unassuming task of cleaning out closets — but not to get re-organized or tidy up.

“This is just still trying to get ready from when we moved in (during the spring),” Justin said. “We’ve never really gotten it done.”

Understandable. Team Scogin has been … well, a little busy.

Contact Teddy at teddy@latech.edu or on Twitter @MamaLuvsManning

Semi-bad news for some of our more wound-up football fan friends. I’d rather you hear it from me than off the streets.

A standard TV set you and I have turns the video signal it receives into beams of tiny particles called electrons. It shoots these beams of electrons at the back of the screen through a picture tube. (No idea how, but it does. It’s science.)

Then, the beams “paint” the pixels on the screen in a series of rows to form the picture. And that’s what we see.

So when we watch something — say football, for instance — we are not really seeing the actual cornerback for Dallas or the center for the Saints or the LSU wide receiver. We are seeing rows of electrons painted pretty colors that look exactly like the players or fans or officials or the insurance duck or Flo from Progressive.

So really and truly, when we holler at the TV set, when we tell the wide receiver how stupid he is for dropping the pass or the linebacker what a dimwit he is for not “wrapping up” and making the tackle, when we’re screaming for the Grim-Faced Owner shown in his luxury suite to fire the coach already and hire anything smarter, like maybe a cantaloupe, none of those people can hear us.

We are yelling at colored dots that can’t hear. They are pretty dots, way better than the dots we used to see on the Philco back before we knew how much it costs to get a new radiator or a vacuum cleaner, but they are still just high-quality dots.

Lipstick on a pig.

Deaf dots, is what they are. Stone deaf dots.

As Vince Vaughn’s character says while playing Madden in The Break-Up, what we’re seeing are “little digital guys with the big hearts.”

And I do love them so.

This doesn’t stop me from hollering at one every now and then. Or at the announcer or the official or the coach. After all, we fans are all just trying to help, right? We’re all for peace on earth — right up until the white hat whistles us for holding on consecutive plays. (Insert scream here.)

We are heading at a furious pace into Prime Hollering Season, and here’s why: there are 43 college football bowl games during the next three weeks. I know: joy and all that.

The first one is the Bahamas Bowl Friday, Dec. 16, just a week from tomorrow night. The finale is Monday, Jan. 9, when a national champ will be crowned at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California. Because of personal mental sickness and a lack of discipline, I will watch as much of every bowl game as is reasonably possible.

Sometimes if things get boring, I will holler at the TV dots to make myself laugh, knowing the TV dots can’t hear. Or holler back.

BowlFest is one of my favorite times of year. People who say there are “too many bowl games” make me want to say there are “too many people.” Those same people never say there are too many soap operas or too many Mannix re-runs; they just don’t watch them. Just don’t watch the games, dude. But let kids who want to play have fun, let the retired guy who volunteers to take up tickets or work parking at the game have fun, and let student-athletes enjoy a few free days in Honolulu or San Diego or Shreveport or Mobile, places they might never go to again.

Instead of hollering at our TV sets and the colored electrons that somehow look like Joe Burrow or Deion Sanders, we should be hollering at you.

Contact Teddy at teddy@latech.edu

By TEDDY ALLEN, Journal Sports

Father Time and The Grim Reaper, that old haunting shadow voted by his classmates as Least Likely To Bargain in that inaugural old-school Class of 0001, is slowly and sickeningly chipping away at the idols of my boyhood.

Former All-Pro quarterback John Hadl, 82 at his passing Wednesday but 32-ish in my 11-year-old boy brain, is the most recent to disappear.

Who is John Hadl? Guys and girls of a certain age and athletic persuasion will raise a hand and testify that he had a special place in our hearts as we came of football-loving age in the late 1960s. We loved him not because we knew how good he was — we sort of didn’t understand that part, not yet — but we loved him because of how bad a couple of things seemed, how wrong.

For one thing, Hadl was missing a vowel. Who took the man’s vowel? How do you say a two-syllable name that has only one vowel? The nameplate on the back of his jersey looked like a misprint.

And then there was that jersey, and that was the main thing. He wore jersey No. 21. But he played quarterback. And quarterbacks wear anything from 1 to 19. A 21 is a cornerback, a flanker, a kick returner.

Plus he was balding. Like, badly. Right there in the middle of his head. I mean, we as kid fans knew the man was old — 30 and not getting any younger — but Lance “Bambi” Alworth, who with Hadl in San Diego in the old American Football League formed one of pro football’s best all-time pass-catch tandems, had hair for days, long, pretty hair, and he was the same age as Hadl, who, we figured, must have “had something wrong” with him.

But there he was, running around for the pass-happy Chargers, making All-Pro with not enough hair and not enough vowels and a number too big.

So you know what? We grew to love him. Even though we never met him. He was sub-standard to us, a semi-novelty, and that made us love him more. Good ol’ 21. The bald guy with the heavy number playing quarterback.

And that’s the thing. I became a writer and met some guys from the next generation of NFL quarterbacks, a Bert or a Bradshaw, an Archie or a Ferguson. But those guys 20 years older, the “old” guys when we were kids, maybe you bumped into a couple, a Namath or a Starr, along the way. But most of them have always been colors on the grainy Sylvania of memory, and sometimes not even colors.

Kilmer and Unitas, Tarkenton and Lamonica, Gabriel and Dawson and the captivating pot-bellied Sonny Jurgensen, who I never met outside of my parents’ TV and on a poster in my room.

And John Hadl.

These guys were, to us, to me, a time. A golden time.

Not 10 feet from where I write are two plastic goalposts and 13 plastic helmets I ordered from the back advertisements of The Sporting News, probably for less than $3, not including shipping. You got to put the decals onto the correct helmet then mount the helmets on the posts. Mine are only NFL helmets; most likely, it was not until I knew who John Hadl was that I knew there was an AFL, a San Diego, or even a West Coast.

Behind me are a stack of felt pennants, each representing a pro football team, this time AFL-inclusive, each not quite eight inches long, and each ordered most likely from the back of Frosted Flakes boxes. It must have been painstaking, waiting for the Boston Patriots and St. Louis Cardinals to come in the mail so they could be thumbtacked to my bedroom wall.

Hadl, we came to understand, was an All-American on offense and on defense at Kansas. He averaged better than 45 yards per punt, and he returned punts and kicks and interceptions twice that far. He must have been the best going-bald athlete in the Midwest. When he retired, only two pro QBs had thrown for more yardage. And by all accounts, he was a gentleman and a loyal Jayhawk, voted the Jayhawk of the 20^th century. (I’ll remind you here that Kansas hoops won two national titles and went to 10 Final Fours last century. And that Gale Sayers went to Kansas. So … there.)

He was much, much more than “a time” to those who knew him. I wish I had — though like a lot of my friends, we felt we did.

As much as any other player of a game we were just beginning to understand and love, John Hadl represented, as we grew, a special time for us, a time born of imperfect men with faulty names and defective numbers and flawed hairlines. Guys like we grew up to be.  

Contact Teddy at teddy@latech.edu

In my personal Tedders brain, Radiance Technologies Independence Bowl memories are a wild wintertime blend of a lost cell phone, a bad dude named Zack Valentine, a giant Sharpie, John Wayne, a hypnotist, a wrist watch, snow, and grinning Iowa State fans walking around filled with joy and dressed as giant ears of corn.

Good times.

I-Bowl teams will tee it up for the 46^th time — only 10 bowls are older — on Friday, Dec. 23 at 2 p.m. at cleverly named Independence Stadium. The afternoon (or make it an all-day) experience would be a thoughtful and fun early Christmas gift, which you can make happen by visiting the bowl’s website (Google “Independence Bowl”) or by calling 318.221.0712.

We hope to see you there. But first … let’s review. 

McNeese State 20, Tulsa 16, 1976: This bowl started it all in America’s bicentennial year, thus the name of the “Independence” Bowl. Tedroe missed the game. Was in high school in West Monroe and probably could not have told you where the stadium was or, if I had known, could not have even imagined any way to get to the game. 

Louisiana Tech 24, Louisville 14, 1977: Saw the highlights on the late news and said, “Wait. What? Bowl game? Shreveport?” 

East Carolina 35, Tech 13, 1978: Was on the sidelines and fairly occupied, through a strange turn of events only the Creator could have devised, as the Tech equipment manager. John Wayne was there and Omar Bradley and, unfortunately, the aforementioned Zack Valentine, who hit our QB near our sideline and literally knocked the snot out of him. This was when a cliché actually happened; I witnessed it. Our friend the late Keith Thibodeaux, still the best all-around athlete I’ve ever seen at Tech, was knocked out of the game early on that play and I was sort of glad he didn’t have to endure the rest of it like we did. Tech had just won two Southland Conference titles in a row, but the other team was better, at least on that cold and sunny afternoon. That was the end of an era, the final game for Hall of Fame coach Maxie Lambright. (They gave us watches at the team banquet and we were thrilled; now team gifts are … well, let’s just say, speaking of eras, a new day has dawned in the Bowl Gifting World.) 

Elderly Miss 35, Texas Tech 18, 1998: Sanford writing products was the bowl sponsor and the beautiful mother of maybe my favorite I-Bowl Memory: the giant blow-up Sharpie in the parking lot. A thing of undisputed beauty. Think of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man in Ghostbusters. God I miss it still. 

Mississippi State 43, Texas A&M 41, 2000: The glorious, unmatched, never-to- be-forgotten Snow Game/Snow Bowl. Watched it on TV because me and 10-year-olds were playing football in the front yard, in the snow, and they didn’t want to stop. We’d run inside to warm up and watch and go back outside. (Ours is the not-as-memorable Snow Bowl — except to us.)

Elderly Miss 27, Nebraska 25, 2002: At the banquet for both teams, a hypnotist — he was nothing short of spectacular, had guys walking around like chickens and such — brought maybe five players from each team up and sat them in chairs and attempted to hypnotize them. It “took” on most, but not on all. Eli Manning was one who tried, but you could tell it was not working on him; not sure any of the Football Manning Family have a brain that can un-think long enough to be hypnotized. So Eli was one of the guys fired. Fortunately for the Rebels, he didn’t fall asleep at the game, either: 25-of 44 for 313 yards and a touchdown. (Programming note: Eli is one of the Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame Class of 2023 inductees; the star-studded bunch will be inducted in July. LaSportsHall.com for more info; hope to see you there, too.)

Missouri 38, South Carolina 31, 2005: Our friend Patrick Meehan was on an elevator a couple days before the game and dropped his cell phone through the slot where the doors close. You could hear it bumping metal and breaking on the way down. Carolina coach Steve Spurrier looked down the narrow opening and said, to no one, “That’s unfortunate.” He had the best post-game quote too: his team led 28-14 at half and when we asked him about losing the second-half lead, he pointed to a couple of his defensive coaches and said, “Go ask those guys.”

Not a third of the way down my list and … we could go on and on. We will, next year. Good grief we love us some Radiance Technologies Independence Bowl.

But now it’s time to look forward, not back. So see you at the game. Wonder what will happen? Come getcha some!

Contact Teddy at teddy@latech.edu