There’s a lot of ways for football coaches to get fired. Maybe the easiest one is to lose a lot of games. You can also lose the support of your players or get into a fight with your school administration or team owners. The one thing that typically doesn’t get you fired is winning. And winning by a lot.

But that is what happened recently at Marist Catholic High School in Eugene, Oregon. Their now-former head coach Zach Loboy was let go after his team beat Cottage Grove 63-0, a game that brought Marist Catholic’s record up to 3-3 on the year. This game only lasted one half, after which both athletic directors decided that was probably enough. Cottage Grove only had 16 players, which, if you do the math, means the majority of kids were playing offense and defense – and neither particularly well. The fireable offense came not in the victory, but in the tactics. For example, up 56 nothing with less than two minutes left in the half, Loboy called for an onsides kick, a tactic used when you’re trying to spur a comeback or surprise a superior opponent, not when you’re up a half century in the second quarter. Even though they didn’t recover the kick, Marist Catholic did get another score before half after an interception, leading to the 63-point total and the decision to call it a day.

Soon thereafter, Marist Catholic fired Loboy, saying the game performance didn’t reflect the school’s mission and values nor was it how they wanted to treat their opponents. Not that it matters that much, but Marist Catholic does have a strong history in the sport, having won five state football titles. So it’s not like the school isn’t used to winning a lot of games.

As you can imagine, this spurred disproportionate news coverage and public debate for the simple firing of a high school football coach, something that happens all the time for all kinds of normal and bizarre reasons. Some of that is just the machinery of contemporary media, but a lot is because of the centrality of the debate it spurred. More specifically, what is the point of high school sports, and what should we celebrate and what do we condemn? That conversation gets even murkier when you try to place that in the larger context of all competitive sport, a construct built on a significant reward structure for winning.

To be clear, I’m not a huge fan of blowouts. No one really gets anything out of it, either athletically or emotionally. It’s not fun for the winners, and it probably pushes the losers away from staying in sports. I also know that in high school sports that place one competitor directly against another, where either technical skill or brute force are paramount, this is simply going to happen. It has nothing to do with how much someone wants to win or effort. For most blowouts, one side is simply way better and way more talented than the other. So I don’t put a whole lot of credence into the counter-narrative that dominant teams have the right to run up the score, and it’s on the losers to keep that from happening. That’s like blaming a coastal village for not stopping a tidal wave.

In this case, the outrage isn’t as much about the score but how the coach let it happen. That’s a fair critique, and I say enough grounds for dismissal. But let’s not pretend we aren’t creating an environment for these kinds of rollovers to happen over and over again. Even without the onside kick, this game was a bad situation. That play just made it worse and perhaps gave us a scapegoat. How to prevent it from happening again is a much tougher question. Because answers typically include things like asking kids to try less, or penalizing scoring. And if you’ve ever watched 30 minutes of a 7-0 soccer game, you know how painful that is. Fixing these kinds of situations may not be impossible, but they would require looking at youth and even elite sport in a whole new light, something unlikely to happen in a society where winning in sport is like breathing clean air. So if you expect most high school football coaches to focus less on dominant team performance without a giant social movement, you’re probably in the wrong country.

So do expect more Marist Catholics, even if we hope coaches are a bit wiser in their play calls. At least if they want to keep their jobs.

Keith Strudler is the dean of the College of Communication and Media at Montclair State University. You can follow him at @KeithStrudler.

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