By Brian Hoffman – Sports Editor
After the Lord Botetourt football team finished the season with nine wins, coach Jamie Harless now has 134 wins for his tenure at LB. That puts him in a special class of high school coaches, and it’s not a big classroom.
Harless is one of just two coaches in Virginia high school football history to be named AFCA first team All-American as a player and win 100 games or more as a Virginia high school head football coach.
Jamie’s son Jackson, who is currently a freshman at Emory & Henry University, did some research after the season and came up with that accomplishment. He used ChatGPT to research all the databases and came up with just two men who had accomplished that, his dad and Mark Dixon. Jamie was an All-American during his playing days at Emory & Henry.
The research included all AFCA First-Team All-Americans across every division, including FBS, FCS, DII, DIII and NAIA. It then matched it against all publicly documented Virginia high school football coaches with known career win totals. The database of Virginia high school coaches with 100+ wins is well-documented through the VHSL historical records and the multi-source “Winningest Coaches in Virginia” compilations.
Dixon accomplished the same feat. After an All-American career at the University of Virginia Mark played for the Miami Dolphins, then returned to Virginia for successful coaching tenures at Galax and Pulaski County High Schools.
“It is odd that he and I became friends before either one of us won 100 games,” said Jamie.
After more research it appears Harless and Dixon are not only the only ones to accomplish this in Virginia, but most likely the only ones nationwide.
Good idea should have been sooner
Why didn’t the NCAA come up with this sooner?
After watching the CFP quarterfinal football games last week I can’t say enough about how much more I enjoy this than the old system. The NCAA went to a four-team tournament for the 2023-24 season and then expanded to a 12-team tournament last year, and I thoroughly enjoyed watching this season’s quarterfinal games over the New Year’s holiday.
Everything is decided on the field, and that’s a good thing. We had four “bowl” games that really meant something to the players and fans. It wasn’t long ago that players on good teams were opting out of those bowl games to make sure they didn’t get hurt before the NFL draft and the games were played in half empty stadiums. That’s not happening in the CFP tournament, and the games are better for it.
This is a crazy season. Alabama, Georgia and Ohio State, who combined for 10 national championships in the past 15 years, all lost in the quarterfinal round. I’ll bet the bookies cleaned up when you compare the lines to the results.
For example, when was the last time you wouldn’t take Alabama getting seven in a football game with Indiana? How about Georgia on the money line to beat Ole Miss? Losers, losers.
Here’s a good one that I’m sure some fans are still shaking their heads over. You know how some folks do a 100-block grid with numbers for each team? If your numbers match the final score you can win a nice sum, depending on how much it costs to get in the pool.
Well, how about if you were sitting on a block that had Georgia-4 and Ole Miss-7. When the Rebels kicked a field goal with six seconds to go and it’s Ole Miss 37, Georgia 34 you had to feel like you were going to win.
Then Ole Miss kicks off and Georgia tries one of those lateral deals, and the first toss misses the intended recipient and rolls out of bounds, nipping the goal line pylon in the process! The side official signals “safety” and that’s a punch to the gut for the guy who had 7 and 4. Now the guy who has Ole Miss 9 and Georgia 4 is set to win, but the game is ruled to still have one second left.
Now, in case you didn’t see it, Georgia has to kick-off due to the safety and the Bulldogs recover an onside kick! Everyone now thinks the game is over, but it’s ruled the clock should not start if the kicking team recovers and, after much discussion, they have to push the victory stand back off the field for one more play with a second still on the clock. At this point Georgia tries another of those lateral plays that turned out to be unsuccessful, but if they had somehow scored that would have been the craziest finish I’d seen since the band came on the field in that California-Stanford game in 1982.
So, Ole Miss advances to play Indiana, and Oregon, who dominated Texas Tech, will take on Miami in the semifinals on Thursday and Friday of this week. With all the crazy stuff the NCAA is doing these days with NIL money and transfer portals, this is one thing they got right.
