Bob Lutz: For depth and dominance, Southeast ’77 hard to beat in City League football

Bishop Carroll is primed to go to 12-0 Friday night in its Class 5A football semifinal game at Salina South. No offense to the Cougars, but this game probably won’t be pretty.

None of Carroll’s games are. The Golden Eagles won nine regular-season games by an average of 47.2 points and have outscored two playoff opponents 115-7.

Carroll is so good, so dominant, that the Eagles are eliciting comparisons to the best football teams in City League history, even though comparing is such a subjective practice that it’s hardly worth the time.

Then again, it’s so much fun.

Certainly, Carroll has a claim to be staked in the discussion. Since an opening-week 43-14 win over Northwest, nobody has been closer than 37 points.

There were a bunch of great Kapaun Mount Carmel teams under Ed Kriwiel during the 1970s and 1980s. East had a pair of state championships in 1982 and 1983. More recently, Heights has won a state title and Carroll won the 5A championship two years ago with a dynamite team.

But the best team I’ve seen is the 1977 Southeast Golden Buffaloes, who dominated the City League when the league was better, top to bottom, than it is today.

Southeast went 9-0 during the regular season, winning its games by an average of 46.3 points. The Buffaloes started that season with a showdown against their biggest rival, Kapaun. There was a huge crowd at Cessna Stadium in anticipation of a classic game between teams that had won state championships the previous season – Southeast in 5A and Kapaun in 3A.

Plus, Kapaun had beaten Southeast in 1976 on the way to a 13-0 season.

This time, though, Southeast won 36-0.

The ’77 Buffaloes filled 15 of the 24 spots on the All-City team and had a roster that included eight players who went on to play Division I football: Quarterback Kevin Clinton (Kansas); running backs Jeff Smith (Nebraska) and Earnie Coleman (Kansas State); tight end-defensive lineman Doug Hoppock (Kansas State); lineman Kerry Benton (Kansas State); offensive tackle Jay Hull (Wichita State); center Jim Meyer (Iowa State); and linebacker Rick Lewis (Nebraska, Kansas State).

Clinton, Benton and Hoppock were chosen to the Eagle’s Top 11 team that season, a rare time when three players from the same team received such a high honor.

Smith, who probably ranks second to Barry Sanders as the finest running backs to come out of Wichita, was a sophomore on the 1977 team. He and Coleman were a devastating tandem and Clinton was an excellent quarterback who went on to pitch in professional baseball.

Southeast was loaded and from 1974 through 1980, the Buffaloes were 74-6 with four state championships and three second-place finishes. They battled for City League supremacy with Kapaun from 1974-77; the Crusaders were 49-3 in those seasons. The Southeast-Kapaun rivalry produced some of the most memorable games in City League history and there were other competitive teams for Southeast and Kapaun to contend with.

Carroll, for instance, was 9-3 in 1977 and lost in the 5A semifinals.

Southeast did have a couple of tough games in the 5A playoffs in ’77, first against Shawnee Mission West in the semifinals, then against five-time state champion Shawnee Mission North in the championship game.

SM West kicked an early field goal to take a 3-0 lead, the first time all season the Buffaloes trailed. Southeast rallied to win 28-11, but its high-powered offense, which had produced 406 yards, was held to 256.

In the final, Southeast fumbled six times yet managed to beat Shawnee Mission North and quarterback Joe Specht, one of the best players in the state that season, 23-14. It wasn’t easy. Smith and Coleman combined for 174 rushing yards and Clinton passed for 203 as Southeast won its 21st straight game and cemented its spot in City League football history.

How would that Southeast team fare against this Carroll team?

Impossible to answer. But there might be hints.

You can’t ignore the number of Division I players who played for Southeast in 1977. And two more outstanding Buffaloes defensive backs, Mark Nordyke and Jim Thomas, went on to play baseball at Wichita State.

It’s too soon to have any kind of historical perspective on Carroll, except to know that what the Eagles are doing is special and unique. The force of their offense is destructive. And their defense has allowed 58 points in 11 games.

A frustration of being someone who wants answers to these “Who’s better?” questions is that we can’t put the ’77 Southeast team up against the ’14 Carroll team. So we can’t know which team is better.

That Carroll has elbowed its way into this conversation, though, speaks to just how good the Eagles are. Could they have beaten that great Southeast team from 37 seasons ago? I don’t think so, but I’d love to see it.

This story was originally published November 20, 2014 at 6:58 PM with the headline "Bob Lutz: For depth and dominance, Southeast ’77 hard to beat in City League football."