The last time anyone outside the greater Seattle area heard from Jon Kitna, he was being pulled off the NFL quarterback scrap heap as an emergency signal caller for the Dallas Cowboys for the final game of the 2013 NFL season. Kitna didn’t see any game action, but he did collect a nice paycheck for his (non-)services: $53,000, which he donated to Lincoln High School in Tacoma (Wash.) where he spends his post-playing days as a math teacher. Kitna also happens to be Lincoln’s football coach, and his son, Jordan, plays quarterback.
Friday night, Kitna’s Abes faced off against Mount Tahoma, a team that had won its first football game in three years earlier this season. Jordan completed 12 passes in the first half (on only 18 attempts) — seven of which went for touchdowns (he also had one rushing touchdown) — in leading the Abes to a 70-0 halftime lead. The final score: 91-0, tying a state record for margin of victory set in 2002. Of course, any time a game ends 91-0 there’s bound to be some questions as to how things played out, but apparently Coach Kitna did everything in his power to limit the damage:
“Outside of just not running the play at all, or taking a knee, I didn’t think there was much that could be done at that point,” Kitna said. “It’s hard because on one end we are trying to preach our guys to not play according to the scoreboard … for our kids, we want them to play hard all the time, winning or losing. So when our backups come in and they are playing really hard in a lopsided game, I don’t really know what to tell them. So you just change what you call as a coach and that’s why we didn’t blitz from the second quarter on and never threw the ball more than five yards in the air in the second half.”
All 60 of Lincoln’s players saw game action, as well. As for the losing side’s reaction, Mount Tahoma coach Ricky Daley didn’t appear to harbor any ill will over the blowout:
“I know Jon from before he was a head coach. I know he’s a good man,” Daley said. “We’re good friends. I don’t think they were running up the score. They were trying to get some other guys some work later in the game and we just couldn’t keep them from scoring. We had to go and stop them and we weren’t able to do that.
“People are going to question (the score), but what are you going to do? Just give us the ball back? They had a lot of short field and that just made it that much easier for them to score. We just have to work on a lot of things.”
“Work on a lot of things”. Understatement of the year right there.
