Football Friday

The high school football season got underway Friday night and the Rocky Mount area teams took a beating.

Tarboro, the preseason favorite in the new Eastern Plains 2-A Conference, showed everyone that losing the NCHSAA 2-A State Championship games has long been forgotten as it paid a visit to Nash Central to start off the 2009 football season. The Vikings routed the Bulldogs 39-0 making it two years in a row to start the season by punishing the Bulldogs.

In Death Valley, brand new head coach Mickey Crouch put his first Northern Nash team on display and the results are much like the past. The Knights played a good half of football leading at one point 14-6. But, by the 48-minute mark, Beddingfield rode back to Wilson County with a 29-14 victory.

In Stanhope, Southern Nash out asted Franklinton 38-27 as the Firebirds will be the only Nash County winner on opening night. The lowlights of the evening was a fight on the field between players in which Nash County deputies had to help restore order.

The night was much better for the Wilson County teams in the new Big East 3-A as Fike came from behind to beat D. H. Conley 14-6, and the newest member Hunt walked the dog on Eastern Wayne 42-14.

Rocky Mount's opponent next week Northern Durham was whacked by Middle Creek 40-6.

Mike Gainey, Rocky Mount's athletic director and head boys basketball coach, will coach the East team next summer in the NCCA East-West All-Star Basketball Game in Greensboro.

Rising junior Benton Moss, who will carry a 14-1 record into his third year on the Gryphon baseball team, committed this week to play baseball in 2012 in Chapel Hill for Mike Fox.

I don't know whether you watched it Friday night or not, but Jerry Jones and the Dallas Cowboys put their brand new $1.5 billion stadium on display as Dallas played Tennessee in the first football game in the new Cowboys Stadium.

You know that everything is bigger in Texas. Jones promised to pay all the overriding cost over $650 million in the new stadium. Jones has had to put about 850 million of his own money into the stadium. You would think $1.5 billion the field would be big enough to play a football game.

On one punt by Tennesse in the third quarter, the game had to be stopped because the Tennessee punter kicked the ball and it hit the scoreboard overhanging the field. You would think spending $1.5 billion they could have spent $10 million more to make the roof high enough.