By JESSE SMITHEY
Way back in July 2018, just a couple months after the debut of 5Star Preps, I posed a question on Twitter, just to stir up some conversation during the doldrums of the summer, when everyone’s just counting down days to the start of high school football.
Sure, I wanted some fun debate on the tweet’s thread, but more than anything I also wanted to find that one game that dominated the conversation more than any other. As I sifted through the 85 replies I received that day, the 1991 Class AAA state semifinal between Oak Ridge and Central seemed to be that matchup brought up the most, as if it were “The Godfather” of high school football games in East Tennessee — you know, the film you just had to see.
I thought maybe we could do an oral history article on the game, and really talk to many of the players and coaches involved in the classic. But the idea never got off the runway, not in 2018 nor the following year when I resurrected the thought of it.
But it dawned on me earlier this week, as we are now in the 2021 state semifinals 30 years later, that now would be the ideal time to do some sort of piece on the game: a 42-41 overtime thriller that surpassed the hype leading up to the game and catapulted Oak Ridge to the 1991 Class AAA state championship, the program’s last of its seven all-time state titles.
Having grown up in West Tennessee, this game was lost on me. But as I’ve grown to love East Tennessee and its high school sports landscape over the last two decades, I felt that I owed it to myself and this Greater Knoxville Area to see this football game, to watch the players of the past who I’ve heard so much about and to validate this game’s place as one of the best high school football games in TSSAA history.
Thankfully, there was a YouTube film of the entire game.
So I decided, this week, to watch the game for the first time.
“What you’re going to see is a back-and-forth game by the best two teams in the state that year,” Oak Ridge coach Joe Gaddis told me this week, before I got to watch it. “I thought we each had a pretty good defense. But in that game, offense ruled.”
So I took notes. Really good notes, too.
My game notes and stats from watching the 1991 Oak Ridge at Central state semifinal on YouTube this week.
I kept stats — well, as well as I could. Remember, this is from 1991, so the film is essentially stripped from a VHS tape. So a few of the player jerseys were illegible.
But the call featured in the video by longtime Oak Ridge radio lead play-by-play man David Clary helped me along with player names and stats throughout, as did his sidekick Jim Vines.
OK, so here we go: 30 years later, let’s break down the 1991 Class AAA state semifinal between Oak Ridge and Central and see just how special it really was…
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