Richard Giannini is one athletic director not afraid to express confidence in his school’s football team ahead of time. The University of Southern Mississippi AD was addressing this thing of re-alignment of the nation’s major collegiate conference.

Give Giannini credit; he’s truly not afraid. Of course it needs to be said that it’s easy to be brave a long time before your team starts playing. But I believe the man has reason to think his coach’s charges will be representative.

Coach Giannini has coach-smarts as well as conference-situation smarts, and you won’t find him slack in the department of watching everything. I may be wrong, but you probably won’t find many coaches lax on the job as regards getting all that’s coming to them essentially all the time.

They don’t call ’em &8220;Coach&8221; for nothing. &8220;Hey, you’re not gonna pull that on me,&8221; I can hear most of ’em retorting when it looks unfair. After all, their jobs depend on winning. They would ordinarily rather fight than switch.

The more I think about it the more I don’t think I want to be a coach, although I have the greatest respect for most coaches I’ve known. Just be ready for them to look out for themselves and their team. And what’s wrong with that?!

Looking Back

This and that about this and that: I’ve broached this subject many times before, but I’ve been asked again about Tony Byrne’s football stats his senior season at Natchez High in 1953. A re-run, as it were.

Fact is, the great NHS running back set a new Big Eight Conference single-season record with 32 touchdowns for 192 points. Tony was something else to watch flying for yards and touchdowns in ’53.

Before the season was over, all of Mississippi’s sportswriters were &8220;covering&8221; Tony and his antics. This is old by good news (I’ve written about it many times over the last 50 years). He averaged 180 yards per game in total offense, though, and that looks good in the sports section any time I choose to talk it again.

On TD runs alone, Tony averaged 24.4 yards. No wonder the entire state was checking on &8220;what Tony Byrne did last week, etc.&8221; He had 16 TDs of 20 yards or more, 11 of 30-or-more!

The Democrat sports department received call after call about &8220;that Tony Byrne you all have running wild down there, up there or over there.&8221; Boy did we have fun telling other writers about Tony Byrne!

Add Clyde Adams, Walter Flowers, Louie Brown, Rex Smith and Russell Lewis to the cast, and you have the stomp-down good football team NHS fielded in 1953, one of the highlight seasons of my writing part-time here at The Natchez Democrat.

Way back when: Dentville High School, a small country school in Copiah County, won every boys basketball game they played from 1912 through 1915. And the same starting five boys played all four seasons! Unbelievable &045; almost.

I wrote about the old Dentville team in a 1988 column, and boy it was fun.

One reason it was so much fun writing about those old days, I knew guard Tance &8220;Uncle Hooker&8221; Hughes personally. Man, did we have fun talkin’ about his old basketball days.

One of these days I’ll talk old Dentville High basketball days when it was almost legal to practically tackle an opponent. On down the road.

Glenvall Estes is a longtime columnist for The Natchez Democrat.