EXCESSIVE SPORTS HYPE?

In the course of a lament over gridiron parents taking the joy out of youth football, Pajamas Media's Tim O'Brien notes, "Little League baseball players should not have 'walk-up music' any more than youth league football players should have 'recruiting videos,' but they do."  I might still have some of my nephew's Greendale Youth Football trading cards (no, they did not come in Topp's bubble gum packs) but I digress.

Rather, dear reader, I want to consider a recent high school football game in which St. Joseph took an early thirty point lead over Mount Carmel, only for Mount Carmel to rally back and win the game.

It made for compelling television.  Television?  Television.  "Mount Carmel football stuns by overcoming 30-point deficit to win on national TV."  Specifically,  on ESPN.

There might not be another game as thrilling as Mount Carmel played on Friday night.

In a nationally televised game, New Jersey visiting St. Joseph Regional High School went up 30-0 on the Caravan just one play into the second quarter. It was the definition of a rout.

Until, the Caravan staged a comeback for the ages. They stunned the high school football world, as Jordan Lynch's Mount Carmel squad overcame that 30-point deficit to shock St. Joseph and win its first game of the season.

That's right, a nationally televised, if on sports cable, game, involving a New Jersey team visiting the Chicago area.

Look, Mount Carmel might be the alma mater of current head coach Jordan Lynch, who figured in the 2013 Heisman Trophy conversations out of Northern Illinois, and St. Joseph Regional might enroll students from parishes that used to send matriculants to Vince Lombardi's St. Cecilia, which closed in 1986.  But still, high school teams playing away games that involve long bus rides or possibly the  booster club raising money for air tickets strike me as a bit much.  We're not talking about Orfordville in Wisconsin playing a short bus ride across the Cheddar Curtain at Pecatonica.

That "win its first game" is also significant.  In Illinois, all schools, whether secular or parochial, fielding eleven player teams compete for seeding in enrollment-stratified tournaments for the state championship.  Mount Carmel took a hard loss at East St. Louis; their next two games involve Nazareth and Marist.  Illinois parochial schools go beyond the usual Catholic and Lutheran affiliations.

There is a separate tournament in Illinois for teams fielding seven player platoons.  I have to use "seven player" rather than "seven man" as a hedge against some teams trotting out a flatlander version of Sophie Cunningham as placekicker.

We'll defer for another day whether the new information about concussions coming to light leads to adverse self-selection in youth football, with the remaining football parents more likely to skew intense and borderline obnoxious.

A nationally televised high school football game is excessive per se.