In high school football, the talent gap between future pros and average Joes can be quite wide indeed, and lopsided scores are nothing new.
But a 106-0 win? That will draw some attention, and after this weekend’s game between Inglewood High School and Morningside High School in Inglewood, many eyes in the sports world are on the City of Champions.
Despite scoring 59 points in the first quarter alone, Inglewood High head coach Mil’Von James declined to play backups and was initially reticent to use a running clock to shorten the game, according to Morningside football coach Brian Collins.
Inglewood High even went for a two-point conversion pass, instead of the traditional one-point kick attempt, after scoring to take a triple-digit lead, which Collins told the Los Angeles Times was “a classless move.”
“I told them, ‘Go play St. John Bosco and Mater Dei,'” Collins said in reference to two of the area’s powerhouse high schools that recently produced the starting quarterbacks at top-tier programs Clemson University and the University of Alabama.
James has also been criticized for allowing quarterback Justyn Martin, a blue-chip prospect and UCLA commit, to play when the game was well out of reach. He threw 13 touchdowns.
James has not responded to an email seeking comment on the game.
In a statement provided to the Times’ Eric Sondheimer, the California Interscholastic Federation Southern Section, which governs most Southern California high school sports, said the 106-0 score “does not represent” the organization’s ideals of character.
“The CIF-SS condemns, in the strongest terms, results such as these,” the statement read.
Other high school coaches were similarly incensed. Matt Poston, head coach at Tesoro High School in Las Flores, said he hoped he was “reading this wrong” when he looked at the score.
“We’re supposed to be teaching young men life lessons through the game. What message was this staff teaching last night? Sad,” Poston wrote.
The national sports media is also weighing in. Legendary basketball sportscaster Dick Vitale took to Twitter to call James “SICKENING & a DISGRACE to the Title of COACH!” for the beatdown.
“Congrats on teaching good sportsmanship,” Vitale wrote sarcastically. “U SHOULD BE FIRED!”
Sportswriter Nick Harris highlighted some of the most eye-popping stats, calling the game “a beatdown for the ages.”
“It’s been in Ohio as early as the mid-1850s at least, brought in as an ornamental plant because of its unique foliage and white flowers,” Gardner said. “It was actually planted in people’s landscaping, and it has been spreading.”
While 106-0 is a score rarely seen at any level of football, it’s not the largest margin of victory.
The most lopsided football score of all time is widely considered to be Georgia Tech’s 222-0 win over Cumberland in 1916, when Cumberland had discontinued its football program but was forced to play the game, putting together a squad of fraternity brothers and other students.
