Gridiron battles breed respect

Published 7:58 am Friday, December 1, 2023

By the time you read this, Thomas County Central and Marist will have played each other for the ninth time in the Georgia State semifinals. But there is a substory to that game that I want to share with all of you today.

The overwhelming majority of the games between Central and Marist saw current War Eagle head coach Alan Chadwick matched up against Yellow Jacket head coach Ed Pilcher. Keep in mind, that you’re not talking about a couple of coaches who could sneak up on anybody, including each other.

Coming to Central in 1991, Pilcher’s teams became the stuff of legend behind knock-you-into-next-week defenses and his vaunted split-back veer offense. Considered archaic by some, it was predicated on the premise that if you could gain 3.5 yards with the quarterback having the option to keep the ball to run it or hand it off every down the opposing team stood little to no chance of stopping you.

As was said by the head coach character played by Denzel Washington in the movie ‘Remember the Titans’: “I run six plays, split-back veer” he said, “It’s like Novacaine. Just give it time, it always works.”

And then there was Chadwick. He, too, built his War Eagle teams around a physical style of play, theirs an option-based attack, too, except built around the wishbone formation with three running backs lined up behind the quarterback in the hopes of gaining just enough yards on each play to make it unstoppable as well.

Chadwick started coaching at Marist in 1976, becoming head coach in 1985. Over the next nearly 40 years, he would become one of only two coaches in Georgia high school history to win more than 400 games, with 460+ wins to his credit and not even 80 losses, one of only two coaches to ever win 400 or more games as a Georgia head coach.

Pilcher would win 250 games and five state titles in his storied career and would be inducted into the Georgia Coaches Hall of Fame in 2017. Chadwick would be inducted in 2022.

The games played between their two teams were physical and hard-nosed, some that went literally down to the last play of the game. You would think that such a rivalry would create a situation between the two coaches that might not be on the friendliest of terms.

What a lot of folks too easily forget is that iron sharpens iron, and it’s no different in the coaching profession. Coaches at the highest level of success often describe games against other quality coaches as “the types of games you look forward to coaching in,” because they know the man on the other sideline is up to the task of equaling the ability that they themselves bring to the table. and that means the games become a chess match of the highest degree of intricacy and strategy.

Of course, the dynamic of their teams was in some ways polar opposite. Chadwick coached an elite bunch of blueblood athletes gathered from all over north Georgia at a private school in a ritzy part of Atlanta. Pilcher coached a bunch of red clay road, blue-collar boys raised in communities like Pavo and Meigs, among others.

Pilcher and Chadwick’s teams would play each other a total of six times, four of which were in the semifinal round of the playoffs. Central would win every game — except the last one, the 2003 semifinal game in the Georgia Dome that featured a kid named Sean McVay as the War Eagle quarterback.

You may have heard of him — McVay would go on to become the head coach of the world champion Los Angeles Rams.

Coach Pilcher passed away last December after a long battle with illness. Along with many other friends and people associated with his career, I made my way to the funeral home to pay my respects to the family. It was a mini-reunion of many of the coaching legends who worked alongside Ed, including Mike Singletary, Ken Harper, Bill Wilhelm, Dennis Cain, Bill Shaver, and others. Many stories regarding those glory days of Central football were retold.

But it wasn’t long before every eye turned toward the front doors, as who would walk in but none other than Alan Chadwick.

The whole room felt the gravity of the moment.

Remember — Pilcher was quite possibly responsible for three of Chadwick’s teams not winning state championships. There may have been no more competitive coaching rivals in the last 50 or so years of coaching in this state than them.

But here he was nonetheless, all the way from that ritzy area of Atlanta, paying his respects in Thomas County to a man who had earned not only his respect but also clearly his admiration as well.

There’s no doubt that I want Central to win this ninth installment of the storied series between the Yellow Jackets and the War Eagles. and I can say without hesitation that win or lose, there is no opponent I have more respect for than Marist.

But given what I saw from him that day, and that little but important substory to the plot of the game that you now know, I can also say without hesitation that there is no coach in the state of Georgia that I have more respect for than Alan Chadwick.