George Carlin’s joke about language getting softer over the years rang hard in The Geek’s ears this offseason, because this here scenario calls for plain speech. Carlin spoke of how “Shell Shock” became “Battle Fatigue” which became “Operational Exhaustion,” and then “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder,” with our military’s choice of terms having shrunk ever further away from the bare reality of things. Mississippi Magazine is an offender what with all the fancy story-spinning that goes on here. But this summer’s quick take is just 10 letters long.
The Geek has spent much of 2024 in Shell Shock. S-H-E-L-L S-H-O-C-K. No sooner did Jefferson County celebrate its best year of football EVER when Lady Fortune (and a few rotten people) brought the hammer down with one shocking, bad, no good, terrible decision after another. Rather than hail our county’s top sports moment in about a century, a handful of big-shots have gone and screwed almost everything up for almost everybody, leaving a community agonized with our jaws a-gape.
2024’s bad dream began just as one of Jeff County’s teams rivaled last fall’s glory on the gridiron. St. Pius X Girls Basketball had reached the MSHSAA Final Four bracket with a rollicking playoff win before a sold-out crowd in April. But once the Lancer girls were on their bus headed to Columbia to play for a state championship, they opened up their phones and saw this:
“St. Pius X kicked out of JCAA Conference.”
Huh.
Wait. Whaaa…?
WHAAATTT?!?
To the public, the JCAA-banishment story seemed to come out of thin air. TGG often dwells a stone’s throw away from St. Pius X, and goes to football and basketball games at Hill Valley. Apart from one weird exchange with a couple of somber old folks in the SPX Field House (we’ll get back to that on scroll), there was no inkling that any change was in the mix, certainly not of the variety that the JCAA’s vote of 2024 has dumped on us.
The Geek wasn’t sure whether to speak his mind at the time. The Geek’s not ashamed to say that Gordon Bess and Russell Korando, the Jefferson County Leader’s tenured sportswriters, give this one courage to speak out in 2024. Korando and Bess took issue with the entire thing from the start, and gave the JCL a completely new street-cred in the “Sports Detective” category. We’ll try to follow suit as best as we can.
If the St. Pius banishment gives you the vibe of “RFK getting sued off a ballot,” you’re on to something. The JCAA’s list of “allegations” against St. Pius X is one of the most drummed-up, shallow pieces of political crap The Gridiron Geek has ever seen. It was obvious back when MyMoInfo published JCAA’s bullet points (only to be hidden from the menu since March) that some of St. Pius X’s rival teams had administrators with grudges. The accusations, at best, make mountains out of molehills, like a political party’s so-called “expose” of a rival. Some of the JCAA’s grudges allegations against Hill Valley sports actually make no sense at all.
For example, MyMoInfo’s story listed a chief charge as “The forfeit of a game against Herculaneum in 2023.” Wait, a school gets in trouble for forfeiting? As covered in this Mississippi Magazine post, that forfeit in Week 6 of 2023 was because of a technicality that didn’t help the Lancers beat the Blackcats, presuming nobody’s scared of 175-pound JV kids moonlighting on Varsity. Coach Ray’s decision to self-report and forfeit the game also became a blessing to Herculaneum’s season. Herky wouldn’t have qualified #4 in its District last October, or hosted Kennett, which turned into an upset victory and a great night for HHS, without Ray forfeiting to Dunklin in good sportsmanship. What a dirty trick to use it against him!
Generally speaking, the Forfeit is associated with goodwill and solid campus-to-campus relations. After all, the school that “opposes” the forfeiting team always wins.
The Cornell-to-Dartmouth forfeit of 1940 is still praised as the ultimate show of sportsmanship in American football history:
The other frightful charge against Hill Valley (in public view, anyway) is the accusation that St. Pius X football has begun “advertising” itself for the “Transfer Portal” in games and events at the team’s small Festus field. Norm MacDonald said that the perfect joke doesn’t need a punch line, you would just have to read the setup, then read the setup again. Read the first sentence of this paragraph again. We have found the perfect joke.
ADVERTISING??? Have any of these JCAA Administrators been to Hill Valley’s gridiron? Heck, they stuck some bleachers up in the middle of a meadow! It’s a beautiful throwback to times when every school’s “football stadium” was a set of bleachers and a mobile concession stand rolled out in some thick grass on the prairie, and we adore it, that’s why Mississippi Magazine nicknamed the St. Pius venue “Hill Valley” after the 1950s scenes in “Back to the Future.” There’s more “advertising” for North County football on North County’s Jumbotron in 6 minutes of an ordinary Mississippi Conference game than there’s been at SPX in 30 years.
As for Herky administrator Clint Freeman (clearly a ringleader of 2024’s circus) and his choice to let the story out at the same time St. Pius X Girls Basketball embarked for Columbia, which left Brooke Blankenship and a stunned, sad group of teenagers to shoot 1.5% and score 6.2 points in their only poor performance of the year, The Gridiron Geek has got a question. WHAT DO YOU THINK THIS IS, AN EPISODE OF COBRA KAI?!? They’re student-athletes, you sanctimonious smarm! Don’t involve our kids in your goofball grudge against conference opponents. They aren’t near childish enough to want to go along with you in the first place!
Herculaneum High School, after close to 10 decades of perfectly fair competition against a local Catholic program, took pains to knife St. Pius X’s state Girls Basketball bid in the back. The Gridiron Geek is so angry, he wants to repeat the speech (ONLY the speech, mind you!) from the movie “Scarface” where Hector Salamanca Shadow Man is trying to car-bomb a whistle blower’s wife and kids, and Scarface stops him, giving up his whole future in doing so. The only wrinkle is that Tony Montana (Scarface) never uses the word “kids.” He calls them “KEESE” instead, just like Scarface always refers to a man as a “mang.”
Oh, you want to blow up a lady and her KEESE, mang? Oh, yeah, a big guy, going to blow up some KEESE, mang! So tough, mang! Bomb a chica and her KEESE, mang??? (BOOF!) Just look at you now. Look at you.
Look at them now. Look at them. SPX’s former JCAA rivals have made every effort to humiliate the Lancers sports program and all of its KEESE kids since the ugly, corrupt vote to kick Hill Valley out took place. St. Pius lost around half of its track meets in April, and has been subject to embarrassing walk-outs and cancellations from opposing campuses. When the St. Pius Varsity Softball Lancers arrived for their Jamboree earlier this month, the young women were told that they were no longer welcome (Grrrroooooowwwwwwllllll) as JHS refused to take part unless St. Pius X was kicked out of that event too.
Wait, couldn’t JHS have let Girls Softball organizers know that they wouldn’t appear at a preseason event with St. Pius kids (those dastardly devils!) way, WAY in advance of the day-of the local Jamboree? And why was Jefferson’s appearance deemed to be more important to the Girls Softball Jamboree than St. Pius’ appearance in the first place? There have been too many times in which 2024’s Hill Valley sports squads have been made to find out they’re banned from participating at the last moment for The Geek to believe it’s all a coincidence. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, a local grown-up’s grudge is being taken out on children. ON PURPOSE!
Grandview and DeSoto were the 2 schools from which administrators and school board members dissented from the St. Pius expulsion vote, making Grandview and DeSoto into 2 of our favorite favorite teams on the blog, instead of just 2 of our 12 forever-favorite teams here at Mississippi Magazine. Coach and CEO Russ Schmidt of DeSoto’s sports administration did all but tell Freeman’s gang that he wanted no part of any of it. Festus folks can feel very proud about that. That’s our fella. Regretfully, the new admins at Festus who are apparently scared to play Girls Basketball against St. Pius X (sheesh) are “our fellas” (and women) too.
The JCAA and St. Pius X: So, What’s Really Going On Here?
What this is really all about, as discussed in Korando’s excellent interviews with the St. Pius faculty this year, is that some rival JCAA administrators (and a handful of fans) have decided that St. Pius has been cheating, or at least trying to cheat against them in sports. That’s why Tilden Watson, Dr. Lehn, Coach Frank Ray and others have taken pains to point out that St. Pius X invites good students who might play sports, and not good athletes who might pass a test, in recruiting. All private schools must “recruit” their student body in some way, though the critical question is whether those recruitments are geared toward sports-first, and thus against MSHSAA’s by-laws. There’s exactly one shadowy story about St. Pius supposedly bringing a kid down from St. Louis in the middle 2010s, but heck, assuming that’s as huge of a scandal as they’re making it now, why was nothing said about it all those years ago? Freeman’s gang got all the old “dirt” together it could on SPX and used it like a political weapon. We know this because more earnest people would’ve addressed that charge, by itself, at the time.
The (real) statistics given by St. Pius as to its amazing Grade-Point Average should be evidence enough that SPX is telling the truth. But any local sports fan should also be able to apply common sense and know that Freeman’s folly is a case of barking up the wrong tree. There are of course private-school teams with artificial advantages in football or other events – we’ve chronicled them here at the Magazine. St. Pius X isn’t one of them. SPX football hasn’t won a District title in 25 years. Valle University has won around 200 championships of all kinds in that time span. Which school is cheating?
Former I-55 Conference teams like St. Vincent have kept their relationship with Valle Catholic sports, but they cast out St. Pius as the cheater of MSHSAA. We’ll see in Week 9 of this season whether Valle or St. Pius looks like the football team with an artificial edge.
Lutheran North won a Class 2 State Championship basketball game by 60+ points recently. Think about that. That means that the state runner-up’s best players could not score on Lutheran North’s third string, in garbage time of a championship game. Lutheran North just happened to enroll the best 12 young basketball cagers in Missouri…all at once? The Geek just doesn’t buy that. They were recruited for sports purposes first. St. Pius went into this football offseason without a valid depth-chart of linemen over 200 lbs. Do we really think that happens at Lutheran North or Cardinal Ritter, where they bring in players from 50 Zip Codes? Coach Ray, miraculously, moved some players around and recruited some others (FROM SAINT PIUS X!!!) to play offensive line and defensive line in 2024, and St. Pius now averages about 220-240 lbs. up front just like OBVIOUSLY similar public school teams from JHS, Grandview, CCHS and the like. Cheating? Absurd.
If we want to make all private-school teams squeaky clean in Friday Night Lights, fine. Begin by prosecuting a case against Lutheran North, or Cardinal Ritter, or St. Mary’s, rather than pick on an honest bid that poses no unfair threat to Herculaneum’s team or any other team, unlike some “Valle 63, Herky 0” teams that we know.
The Geek got one major story from 2023 very wrong, assuming that the SPX-Herky forfeit happened in a friendly fashion. In the words of Dr. Spock from Star Trek, “No…it did not.” Herky’s coaches ran on the field in an uproar after spotting the “7 quarters” Junior Varsity player on the field in an extra frame, and refused to shake hands, demanding the Lancers forfeit on the spot. That does change our perception of Herculaneum’s reaction to the snafu. Coaches reportedly yelled things like “We spotted him! You cheated! Forfeit the victory!” and so on. But it was a lopsided game that night, and there’s no “cheating” involved in making more garbage-time substitutes than you’re supposed to.
Did they have any idea how embarrassing it must have been for Herky’s brave players, who turned the season around on their own without any front office shenanigans, to see some of their coaches try to gain a cheapie victory like that? St. Pius did a noble thing by forfeiting, but the HHS faculty was petty for egging it on.
Dunklin’s bad faith politics seemed to curse 2024’s whole football offseason. Fox and Seckman’s fields both flooded, the former from the Meramec River during Tropical Depression Beryl, but yet the second – incredibly – from the humble Rock Creek valley in Imperial. It’s a small wonder that Windsor and Herky’s riverside fields didn’t find a way to flood too, and Crystal City’s field was probably only saved from the “Rolling Beryl” when the Flash Floods in the Tri-Cities beat the mighty Mississippi to the punch in rushing over their banks, causing the great river to smash into the big levees at Cape Girardeau instead. Fox and Seckman will subsequently be homeless for the foreseeable future, and don’t listen to contractors who claim that each school’s football amphitheater could be ready to rock again by October. If you’ve built a house, you know they’re lying.
Then, out of nowhere, Regional Radio was sold down the river (not the Mississippi River). Alpha Media not only shut down all local programming at KJFF, KREI, J-98, and others of our nearby sports broadcast stations, but instructed the station managers to be very shady about telling everyone what had happened. To this day, Week 1 of the Friday Night Lights season, there is still “radio silence” coming from KJFF and its sister stations about the status of local programming this fall, namely on Fridays. Rumors are persisting that KJFF and J-98’s sponsors revolted, and threatened to yank all of the cash out of Alpha’s operation if the football (and other) teams from our schools aren’t scheduled back on the air right away. But we must also report that Griffin Weinberg, last year’s host of the Regional Radio End Zone Show, quit the company and went to Ohio.
Then the JCAA’s remaining schools decided to act like Democrats and Republicans in Congress, doing an end-run around the law of the land to get exactly what they wanted when they wanted it, only with some weird asterisk that lets everyone know it’s actually a fraud. The JCAA admins wanted to punish St. Pius for those 25 years of 0 championships, and they were so scared of ever seeing another Varsity Lancer on a football field (those barbaric brutes!) that they all voted to disband the beautiful I-55 Conference, and replace it with the “Quad County Conference,” of which there are probably about 700 total in the United States. There is no alternative I-55 Highway – it belonged to us. Now the league sounds as generic as the “Patriot Act.”
The I-55 Conference still exists (there’s your asterisk), because Moe, Larry, and Curly forgot that Coach Ray and St. Pius had to take part in a unanimous “yes” vote to get rid of it. So now, St. Pius Football is independent according to common sense, but technically it’s the I-55 Conference’s only team. We’re gonna have some fun with that. (There will be an awards ceremony.)
Mississippi Magazine won’t impugn any of our 12 football teams for this in any way. As far as The Geek is concerned, this is a foolish move by privileged, disconnected stiffs who exist far apart from the day-to-day reality of student-athletes in the county, who all tend to know each other (in the sports community, anyway) and are probably thinking that this entire affair of 2024 is hilarious or stupid, or both. St. Pius kids grew up in Jefferson’s neighborhood and vice-versa. They’re not going to start looking at each other differently and they’re not going to stop making friends, no matter how many toddlers administrators with a grudge try to get them to feel bigoted toward another campus and its sports kids. Coach Ray gave The Gridiron Geek what your author considers this offseason’s best remarks about this phony “Cobra Kai” war that a few jerks tried to invent:
“We’re not mad at any team. We don’t blame any kids or parents. This was done by a small band of out-of-touch people, having an ego trip. They have no idea what’s really going on with their own students, or with ours.”
If no moral argument will sink in on those who voted St. Pius out, maybe they will at least prove to be cynical enough to worry about losing gate money in many football seasons to come. For instance, Herky’s 2024 schedule really doesn’t have any traditional rivalry games left, unless you count Jefferson (Est. 2011) or Grandview (Est. 2018). Will future home games against the likes of Cuba, Bayless, and Fredericktown draw ticket money like a good old Herky vs St. Pius game? No sir, they won’t. Parents and “obligatory” attendance is likely all that they’re going to get to turn out for those snoozers.
The Geek can’t think about this anymore. Let’s calm down with some Hall & Oates.
(Snap)
You’re out of touch
(Snap)
You’re out of touch
But you’ll be runnin’ outta bread
Without the Lancers around
Is There a Silver Lining This Time?
TGG is known for his dark clouds and silver linings. Every tale of a team’s triumph comes with a downside, like the pressure to follow-up a championship year. Each bit of bad news comes with hope for the future, like a losing team’s potential revival. That’s the duality of every sport, and kids are used to reading about it.
Not gonna lie – it’s hard to paint a silver lining on the black offseason of 2024. All we can do from a fan’s perspective is try to help pick up the pieces. The Geek owes his own apology to 2 older faculty members whom he got into a testy exchange with on the night of the Girls Basketball quarterfinals, once they curtly shut down TGG’s attempt at friendly introductions.
They were wearing such long, embattled faces that you wondered what they could’ve been so upset and forbidding-to-outsiders over on a joyous evening like that one. Now we know. Oh, good heavens, now we know! Sorry!
This year’s actual *football teams* from Jeff County seem to have shrugged it all off already. That’s the best, and only upside that really counts. Hillsboro still has its All-State quarterback, and Seckman High School still carries a 17 game regular-season winning streak into its “barnstorming” season. Herculaneum is ready to earn 6+ wins on the gridiron, rather than needing its assistant coaches to extort Forfeit Ws out of opponents who scored more touchdowns. Crystal City and Grandview went from recruiting “15” and “14” players respectively (from training camp reports) to having about 55 combined in real life, which is regrettably the only reference to “55” that will bring a smile to anyone’s face (who isn’t named “Freeman”) this preseason.
St. Pius is making lemonade out of lemons with its independent schedule, a fascinating trek through 3 states and several class divisions of MSHSAA. It’s true that there are a couple of virtually unwinnable games on the Hill Valley slate this year, like Week 9’s matchup against Valle University, and a road trip to face a Tennessee program from the ESPN 100. Those will be “learning experience” bouts for the ’24 Lancers. But there’s also a bunch of well-matched games that we usually only get to see in the playoffs, like SPX-Caruthersville. People who read The Geek back in 2019 will recall how bananas that contest can be.
Besides, you know what? By treating St. Pius sports kids like the Olympic Athletes of Russia who walked-in on a Hillary Clinton rally, the school’s former I-55 Conference rivals have – by accident – helped the Lancer athletes have a lot more fun. Or at least they will have a ton more fun once Watson’s “front office” gets everything figured out, and no longer has to send kids out to be boycotted and made into political pawns. Hill Valley is going to get to play an “exotic” schedule in all sports, performing in the type of captivating matchups that our local league-based teams can only sit around and yearn for most of the time. Think of Seckman’s schedule or Fox’s schedule on an annual basis, so locked into a huge conference slate that they can’t schedule awesome games against crosstown rivals like Windsor or Northwest respectively (though Fox has pulled it off for 2024-25). It frustrates Mississippi Conference teams that they can’t escape each other in Class 4, District 1, and go play a team from Columbia or Joplin, win or lose, in the playoffs. It stinks to have a good season and never play 60+ miles from home. Incontrovertibly, the Lancers don’t have that problem any more, but the QCC (is that a Shopping Network?) does.
See Tunnel, See Light: KFMO Sports Shows a Pulse in August
TGG relies on the Regional Radio End Zone Show. If it’s gone for good as of 2024, that’s an issue for Mississippi Magazine’s quest to provide good reporting. But there’s bigger fish to fry in the offseason media story too. We’re all upset that A) Hillsboro finished runner-up in MSHSAA Class 4, B) Park Hills Central finished FIRST in MSHSAA Class 3, and C) Less than 6 months afterward, KJFF Sports and KFMO Sports (and J-98 Sports) folded up, right in the faces of their kids who just went to state!
Maybe there’s light at the end of the tunnel. KFMO, mysteriously, became the only Regional Radio affiliate to begin advertising for the new football season, promising a slate of 2+ broadcasts each Friday night. KFMO, maybe through a friend or maybe through Alpha Media’s new corporate HR department, even hired a pretty darn good reporter to do preseason head-coach interviews for our southwestern teams like the Central Rebels. The coaches’ remarks are more candid and informative compared to everything we’re used to reading on MyMyInfo or SemoBall, etc, so that’s an unexpected spark of hope.
Meanwhile, all the Facebook pages that belong to KJFF and J-98 and KREI are whistling past the graveyard, putting up generic content about 1x/week that gets ignored by everyone. The Gridiron Geek is shocked that there hasn’t already been an email or phone-call campaign to drown Alpha Media in requests until somebody provides some real answers. If the KFMO team (or its newly rearranged team) is prepared to broadcast as usual, then does that mean the rumors are true, and KJFF absolutely has to keep the Friday night show on the air from 7-12, or risk losing every sponsor? We can pray. Unfortunately, we can’t do much more than that. (Regional Radio has ignored The Geek as a matter of principle since the late 1990s, or otherwise he would have called already.) Mississippi Magazine suspects that if there’s no Week 1 Friday Night Lights to be heard on KJFF or any other county station, there will be a sudden firestorm of folks asking what-the-crap is happening.
We can fend for ourselves in Week 1. But the Regional Radio sports folks – or what’s left of them – owe their long-time listeners an explanation (and a word on the “game plan” for 2024) by this Friday. After all, how many times have we all sat patiently gritting our teeth to “Hood’s Discount Home Center (For a New Generation)”? We go through torture for you people!
Regional Radio’s value to Jefferson County football is so important, the End Zone Show going off the air could even make people sad that we never have to listen to “Hood’s Discount Home Center (For a New Generation)” again.
It would still be a BRIGHT silver lining, though.