Uh, coach, you just don’t know Prosser

YAKIMA — In the middle of the 2007 Class 2A state championship game, Prosser football coach Tom Moore found himself experiencing a little bit of déjá vu.

Two years earlier, in the Class 3A final against a Ferndale team quarterbacked by current Washington Husky star Jake Locker, the Mustangs had been throttled to the tune of 47-12, beaten up and down the field in every way a team can be beaten.

“I never thought it was a case of anybody running up the score,” Moore said.

“They just kicked our butts, I said ‘Nice game’ and that was it. I would never say anything or even think anything about somebody else running up the score.”

In 2007, of course, it was Prosser winning big in the title game, and it was during that 42-7 trouncing of  Burlington-Edison that Moore found himself musing over the similarity of the two games. To him, one team was just that much better than the other.

So it surprised him to read about Burlington-Edison coach Bruce Shearer’s disparaging comments about Moore and the Mustangs to a Skagit Valley Herald reporter, published last week in that newspaper and later reprised in a Herald-Republic preview of Saturday’s semifinal rematch between the Tigers and Prosser.

Shearer said the Mustangs “ran up the score on us, like they did with a lot of teams last year.” He also accused Prosser of “setting records at the expense of high school kids,” an apparent reference to the prolific passing records put up by Moore’s elder son Kellen, now a redshirt freshman starting at Boise State, and younger son Kirby, a Prosser senior whose 91 career touchdown catches are a national record.

Mr. Shearer, you don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.

When you’re talking about last year’s running-up, perhaps you weren’t talking about the game in which Prosser led 71-0 at halftime and scored one — that’s 1, uno, ONE — touchdown after halftime while playing everybody but the water girls. Or the one where Prosser led 49-0 at halftime and managed to score no points in the second half by using eight different ballcarriers running behind a bunch of second- and third-team linemen. Or all of the games in which quarterback Jordan Durbin threw no passes in the fourth quarter.

For the record: During Kellen Moore’s senior year, he threw exactly two of his 58 regular-season touchdown passes in the fourth quarter — each with nearly 11 minutes remaining. That year, he threw four fourth-quarter passes all season.

Four. Yeah. That’s really running it up, all right.

Yes, I have seen teams run it up. I hate teams that do it. Hate ‘em. And in eight years here, I have yet to see Prosser do it.

Check that. Once, Moore put his starters back in during the late going of a 2006 blowout after the opposing team got overly exuberant in celebrating a play in which one of his players was laid out with a clean, but devastating slobberknocker of a hit. Moore considered that unsportsmanlike, and he answered in kind.

But a history of running it up? Nope. Nobody who has seen Prosser play in the last eight years — and I can only to speak to my tenure here — would buy that.

Former Quincy coach Bill Alexander told me he’s had to “battle some of my very best friends over that same issue. Coaches, guys on the west side,

who see the scores and think (Prosser) must be running it up.”

That’s just not the case, Alexander says. I remember talking with him after a game in which Prosser had whipped Alexander’s team and he told me in no uncertain terms, it would have been a lot worse had not Moore called off the dogs — and early.

“He was very kind,” Alexander said that night. On Saturday, when I told him about Shearer’s incendiary quotes, he shook his head.

“Hey, listen,” he said. “Look at what Kellen’s doing now at Boise State. Listen: He threw for a million yards and a million touchdowns at Prosser, and his dad was holding him back. Holding … him … back.”

Prosser’s players all knew about Shearer’s comments by Saturday’s game, but it didn’t seem to be a big issue to them.

“Some guys were angry but not really too much, because (Shearer) didn’t really understand it,” receiver Matt Young said. “We’re just playing football, and it’s your job to stop us. If you can’t do that, we’re just going to play.”

And no, they shouldn’t have to stop themselves. But they do. A lot.

• Scott Sandsberry can be reached at 509-577-7689 or ssandsberry@yakimaherald.com