The final two games of the 2019 high school football season will be played today at War Memorial Stadium in Little Rock when the champions for Class 2A and Class 3A are determined.
Each year as we leave the press box on the second Saturday night in December, my friend Tom DeBlack says: "Well, it's a sad time." For those of us who love high school football, late August through early December is the best time of the year. To get us through the offseason, my colleagues at the Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette have published a book titled Prep Rally: The History of Arkansas High School Football.
For 13 consecutive Friday nights each fall, I host a two-hour high school scoreboard show that airs on more than 50 radio stations across the state. Some of our regular correspondents for that show contributed to the book.
There's Matt Jones, who began covering high school sports for the weekly Waldron News in his hometown in 2001 and is now the online sports director for the Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Matt also is the play-by-play broadcaster for Fayetteville High School. There's Leland Barclay, the author of the Almanac of Arkansas High School Football and a man who lives for these first two weekends in December when six state titles are decided. There's Walter Woodie, a former sportswriter in Fort Smith who now covers games for this newspaper each Friday night and is an expert on all things high school football.
Hawgs Illustrated publisher Clay Henry, who I've known since his days covering sports in the 1970s at the Log Cabin Democrat in Conway, and Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette sports editor Chip Souza joined Jones as authors of the book. Other contributors include Henry Apple and Rick Fires of the Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, along with Jeremy Muck of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, with whom I tape a high school football podcast each Monday during the season.
"Compared to other Southern states, Arkansas seemed behind the times when it began its modern playoff system for all classes--minus the state's largest schools--in 1970," Woodie writes. "Border states such as Texas (1920), Louisiana (1921), Oklahoma (1944), Missouri (1968) and Tennessee (1969) had full playoffs before Arkansas began its current system. Only Mississippi (1981) has a shorter span of playoff football.
"Yet Arkansas was in the vanguard of starting the playoffs. Actually, the Arkansas Athletic Association (now known as the Arkansas Activities Association) did attempt football playoffs before any of our neighbors did. In fact, the AAA made two efforts to start a football playoff system. The AAA--a decade before Texas--had a one-division playoff system in 1910 and 1912, won by Fort Smith and Van Buren, respectively. But for 33 years, there would be no playoffs."
Every school in the state, many of which didn't field football teams, could vote on football issues. Orville Henry (Clay's father) became the Arkansas Gazette sports editor at age 18 in 1943. Before he became known as the leading scribe of University of Arkansas athletics, Henry often wrote about high school sports. He criticized the Arkansas Athletic Association for not having a full-time executive director, for not having playoffs and for letting "aginners" run the show. Member schools voted in 1945 to hire a full-time director and begin football playoffs for all schools in 1946.
For the state's biggest towns, there was a loose confederation of about 15 schools known as the Arkansas High School Conference. A high school playoff for small schools in 1945 was won by Lake Village. In 1946, the first year for all schools to participate, Little Rock High School defeated Helena en route to a 14-0 season and at least one version of the unofficial high school national championship. After beating Helena, the Tigers went to Baton Rouge for something known as the Toy Bowl and defeated a team from New Orleans.
"The AAA created a multidivision playoff system from 1947-50 and again in 1952," Woodie writes in the book. "The state's six largest schools of 500 students or more created a fourth division and the round-robin champion was declared a state champion. The state's largest classification went by many names--the Big 6, Big 8, Class AAAA and Class AAAAA--and would not participate in the playoffs again until 1983."
The playoffs were disbanded in 1953. Bad weather as winter approached, schools wanting to start basketball with all athletes available and superintendents not wanting seasons to end with a playoff loss were among the reasons cited for the decision.
"When Class AAA split into Class AAAA and Class AAA in 1968, the AAA-East and AAA-West conference winners played a championship game for the Class AAA title," Woodie writes. "In 1969, the Class A schools voted to have a playoff in that class. Finally, in 1970, schools voted to bring back the playoffs. Since that time, no one has asked for the playoffs to be eliminated."
There are now 124 playoff games among the six classifications. If the weather is good for two consecutive weekends, which is always a gamble in early December, total attendance at War Memorial Stadium for the six championship games can exceed 50,000 people. The record announced attendance for a title game was 25,386 in 2005 when a Springdale team coached by Gus Malzahn, now the head coach at Auburn University, defeated West Memphis by a final score of 54-20. Another prep season comes to an end tonight, and the long wait until August begins.
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Senior Editor Rex Nelson's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. He's also the author of the Southern Fried blog at rexnelsonsouthernfried.com.
Editorial on 12/14/2019