A debate for the ages
Who’d win between these peerless titlists? You make the call
W ith the Thursday night premiere of the ESPN documentary “What Carter Lost,” the time has come to revive one of the great sports bar/barbershop debate topics of Texas high school football.
Freed from the bonds of time and space, who would win a game between the star-crossed 1988 Dallas Carter Cowboys, defrocked Class 5A champions of 1988, and the Yates Lions, undefeated 5A champions of 1985?
Carter vs. Yates unquestionably would be quite a game, matching two of the greatest coaching personalities in the business, Freddie James at Carter and Lions mentor Luther Booker, and some of its finest players, including quarterback Robert Hall and linebacker Jessie Armstead at Carter and running back Johnny Bailey and linebacker Melvin Foster at Yates.
Booker died in 1994, but James is still around at age 80, and he has no doubt about the outcome.
“We would win it,” James said. “I had the better defense. But it would be a good game.”
Maurice McGowan, one of Booker’s top assistants and his successor as Yates’ head coach, begs to differ.
“We could do more things on offense,” McGowan said. “And our defense was good enough to hold Carter.”
Both are inarguably the best football teams produced by their school districts in the last half-century. Yates was the first Houston Independent School District team to win a title in the state’s largest classification since 1953, and Carter before its disqualification was the first Dallas ISD champion since 1950.
In fact, contemplating a Carter-Yates game prompts the very real question of whether we ever again will see a team from the
Dallas or Houston independent school districts win a big-school championship.
Carter-Yates inspires arguments, discussions and flights of imagination because they were in many ways mirror images. Both were products of proud neighborhoods — Houston’s Third Ward and Dallas’s far South Oak Cliff — and pioneers as primarily African-American schools succeeding in an era not far removed from the last vestiges of school segregation in many parts of Texas.
Both were centers of great talent that, until their signature seasons, always came up short. Yates, as a member of the UIL, had advanced to just one championship game, losing to Richardson Lake Highlands in 1981. Carter’s deepest advance before 1988 was to the 1982 semifinals.
Yates was rated only sixth in Class 5A, which was then the largest classification in Texas, in 1985 by Dave Campbell’s Texas Football in large part because the Lions had suffered substantial losses to graduation and lost some players during the previous spring to the new no-pass, no-play rule. Carter likely would have been ranked first rather than second in 1988 but for the Cowboys’ previous playoff shortcomings.
Carter arguably had the harder path to the title. While Yates did not play a game against a team from outside Houston save Beaumont West Brook in a non-district contest, Carter played Tyler John Tyler and Killeen, winning the latter game in a 25-24 squeaker, and had a 24-24 tie with Duncanville that gave the district title to the Panthers. Marches into history
Yates’ only regular-season challenge during a period in which the Lions set a state record for consecutive district wins came in a 13-6 win over Jones, which lost nine turnovers. Otherwise, Yates posted five regular-season shutouts and allowed just two teams to score in double figures.
Carter countered with four regular-season shutouts, also allowed just two opponents to score in double figures and closed out the regular season with a 50-2 rout of Dallas Kimball in the “Oak Cliff Super Bowl.”
Both teams had stiff playoff challenges. Yates and West Orange-Stark were tied at 6-6 entering the fourth quarter before the Lions pulled away to win 19-6, and the Lions struggled to survive a 21-15 rematch against Jones in the quarterfinals.
Amid the uncertainty of whether they would be allowed to play in the playoffs because of an eligibility dispute involving running back-defensive back Gary Edwards, Carter needed a lastsecond touchdown catch by Armstead in a 22-18 win over Marshall, which advanced to the 1989 semifinals and won a 1990 division title, and won 14-9 against the Odessa Permian team whose season was chronicled in H.G. Bissinger’s classic book “Friday Night Lights” and in a less accurate film directed by Bissinger’s cousin, Peter Berg.
Both championship games were walkovers. Playing defending co-champion Odessa Permian at Texas Stadium, Yates eked out a 9-0 halftime lead but scored 28 unanswered points in the second half for a 37-0 win, which at the time was the most lopsided title game outcome in 5A history. Bailey ran for 190 yards, and Yates’ defense held Permian to nine rushing yards and on 20 of 35 running plays held Permian ballcarriers to no gain or lost yardage.
Carter’s defense was similarly dominant against Converse Judson in 1988. Hall, who threw for 208 yards, led the Cowboys to a 24-0 halftime lead en route to a 31-14 win in which Judson managed 151 yards and six first downs.
In the final tale of the tape, Yates outscored opponents 659-77, setting a 5A season scoring record, and averaged just under 400 yards a game and allowed 124 per game. Bailey, who went on to win three Division II player of the year awards at Texas A&M-Kingsville, ran for 1,098 yards despite seeing part-time action during the regular season, and quarterback Charles Price threw for 2,213 yards, a respectable total in a ground-oriented era.
As for the Yates defense, which was so deep that future NFL star Santana Dotson was a role player as a junior lineman, it forced an astonishing 64 turnovers.
Carter in 1988 outscored opponents 375-119, averaged just under 300 yards per game and held opponents to 180 yards a game, forcing 55 turnovers with a defense led by Armstead, who played on two national championship teams in Miami and in Super Bowl XXXV with the New York Giants, and secondary stars LeShai Maston, Clifton Abraham and Derric Evans.
So who would have won the game, you ask?
In 1990, after covering the last five championship games of the decade, I selected Yates as the top Class 5A team of the decade in Texas Football, and I did so again a decade later in the magazine’s 40th anniversary issue.
Second in both cases was not Carter but the 1989 Odessa Permian team that didn’t get written about in “Friday Night Lights” but had two running backs who rushed for more than 1,000 yards and a quarterback, future NFL player Stoney Case, who threw for 27 touchdowns, and won the championship over an Aldine team that a year later was considered arguably the nation’s best. Carter was third on my list for the 1980s.
1985 Yates vs. 1988 Carter would have been a fitting showcase for two of the greatest teams in what was, for my money, the best era of the modern high school game, the years from 1982 through 1989 that featured two playoff teams per district but a single, undisputed champion. Power shifts to suburbs
It would have been a great game, featuring accomplished, underrated quarterbacks and defenses that were downright scary. I’ve always thought that the presence of the late, great Johnny Bailey would have turned the tide in Yates’ favor.
But, then again, I could be wrong. Dennis Parker, who attended the 1985 Yates-Permian game, coached the Marshall team that lost to Carter in 1988 and lost twice to Permian in 1989, said Carter was the best because it had such speed on defense.
“Other than Nebraska, when I was coaching at North Texas, I never coached against a faster team,” Parker said. “They were blitzing eight and playing man to man with better people than we had.”
D.W. Rutledge, whose Judson team lost to Carter in the 1988 final, gives Carter the nod. So does Dan Hooks, whose West Orange-Stark team lost to Yates in 1985. Longtime Houston coach Ray Seals, whose Milby team lost 51-0 to Yates and who scouted the Cowboys in 1988, gives the nod to the Lions.
Pat Culpepper, an all-Southwest Conference defender for Darrell Royal at Texas and coach of the Lufkin team that lost to Carter in 1988, gives the edge to Carter on defense. On offense, he said, Yates likely would have had a slight edge.
And now, as ESPN viewers are either reminded or learn for the first time about the 1988 Carter saga, a new generation of Dallas ISD and Houston ISD teams prepares for a new season in a considerably different era for both school districts.
In a time of declining enrollment, HISD teams are now scattered from 6A through 4A. The only HISD teams to play for a title since Yates were Lamar in 2012 and Yates in 1992, with the Madison team led by quarterback Vince Young advancing to the semifinals in 2001. Only seven of 26 schools have won 10 games in a season this century, and nine have never recorded a 10-win year.
The Dallas ISD, reduced these days to two 6A schools, has had similarly hard times, with Dallas Lincoln (2004 Class 4A) the last school to advance to a title game. Only eight of 21 schools have a 10-win season this century, and five have never won 10 in a season.
The power centers of Texas metro football are now the suburbs — Katy, North Shore, Manvel and Pearland, among others, in the Houston area, and DeSoto, Aledo, Cedar Hill, Duncanville and others in Dallas.
Absent an upset of the first order, 1988 Carter and 1985 Yates will continue to be the standard as they retreat further into history.