Manning: Scoring outbursts have been a sight to see this season

The Cascade Christian High football team just set the school record for most points scored in a game when the Cougars routed Vashon, 82-6, on Saturday night.

After the win, coach Randy Davis was as poignant as ever about his team’s lopsided win.

“I hate it — that score,” he said.

Why would anyone care for a score like that?

Honestly, not many should care for any scores that resemble more like those in EA Sports’ Madden video game than one fielded by a couple high school teams. Competitive games matter.

Even wining a video game against a friend with the score Cascade Christian put up, the question really is: How often would they be willing to play you again?

People have an innate desire to compete by nature, and in these high school games, it’s never more apparent.

“That’s a good man over there (Vashon coach Clay Eastly),” Davis said. “You hate scores like that for their guys because they competed the whole game. But when our backups score, like — What can we do? You can’t tell them to stop competing.”

It’s now been three football games that I’ve covered in October where three teams set school records for points: Sumner (76; Oct. 1), Graham-Kapowsin (71; Oct. 7) and Cascade Christian (82; Oct. 8). That’s a total of 313 combined points scored.

That’s 45 times a team scored a touchdown: 18 through the air, 24 on the ground, two on defense and one on special teams.

It’s a lot of scoring — and a too many late-night rushes when it comes to making my deadline.

Yet Davis touched on the one silver lining from all this: These kids never stopped competing — for both teams on either side of the ball.

“We had to keep up the pressure because that’s a dynamic offense. We couldn’t let up because they can put up points in a hurry,” said G-K Eric Kurle after the Eagles set a new scoring record against Puyallup.

There are many teams that fail to even reach that scoring output for an entire season.

To put those numbers in perspective, only seven teams in the NFL failed to score more than 313 points last season (Miami, Tennessee, then-St. Louis, Cleveland, Dallas and San Francisco), and 39 out of the 128 college FBS teams failed to score more than that all season.

Oregon State was the only Pac-12 team to not break the triple century mark.

Those NFL teams had 16 games, and the college teams had 10 to put up their numbers, while this was over just a mere three games.

“We’re not the kind of team that runs up the scoreboard — we’ve never been that here,” Sumner coach Keith Ross said. “(But) that Puyallup passing attack is so dangerous, we had to keep our starters on defense in late.”

It’s an entire season’s worth of scoring crammed into a three-game span.

And after each game as I went up to each coach, happy with the results, cringing at the score each time, I’m only reminded that these are the games fans might care for — and what the teams hate when it comes down to it.

“You really feel for their kids. You really do,” Davis said.

This story was originally published October 13, 2016 at 10:23 AM with the headline "Manning: Scoring outbursts have been a sight to see this season."