Brian Out Loud Archive

There are always different paths available to the same destination, and often the same result, and that is exactly what college football is shooting for as it looks into blazing a new trail to a championship.

The current playoff format is four teams. Save for an exception here or there, it’s typically the same teams competing for a title year after year, with Alabama, of course, being the safest bet in the game.

We’ve got Tim Tebow in the NFL, Tony La Russa unhappy with his own player violating a rule that isn’t even written down and fans at games behaving like the teacher just left the room for five minutes.

Man, sports, get your mind right. Because at the moment, you’ve lost it.

Resilient seems to be the most fitting word to describe the senior athletes who will walk across the stage at graduation Saturday inside the Bay Center in Pensacola.

It’s fitting because it took a lot of resilience mixed in with mental toughness and a willingness to adapt to get through a senior season that was anything but normal.

If there was anyone who took last year’s shutdown of the sports world in stride because of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was Michael Sandle.

He just went with the flow, staying level-headed, always believing that things would get back to a degree of normalcy and that he would get to play baseball again.

We made it everyone. The curtain has been lowered on the 2020-21 high school sports season.

Normally, the end of the season isn’t a cause for celebration, but this one is different.

Navarre athletic director Scott Murphy has told me the story before about the time the Raiders were at the state softball tournament and someone mispronounced Navarre while also wondering where the heck the town was in Florida.

That was more than a decade ago.

I’ve never been one to put a lot of stock into rankings, be it preseason, in-season or postseason. They have as much value as the lint in my pocket. Maybe less.

Apparently, rankings mean even less than I first thought based on how the Region 1-2A bracket was set up for flag football.

It’s the summer of 2015. It’s hot and humid. The sun is unforgiving as it bakes the football practice field behind Bennett C. Russell Stadium.

I’m here to watch the Raiders put in work at one of their trademark intense summer workouts, and my focus is locked in on two players in particular. Michael Carter and Thomas Leggett.

Once upon a time, flag football at Navarre was merely a dream. The closest players came to it was the annual powder puff game between the girls in the junior and senior classes.

Things have changed. The dream has become a reality as Navarre has made a name for itself in the sport.
It doesn’t surprise me. It shouldn’t surprise you either.

Major League Baseball tends to stick to tradition. It doesn’t embrace change the way other pro sports do, sometimes avoiding it like a plague.

That is until two weeks ago when commissioner Rob Manfred dropped the hammer on Atlanta by pulling the 2021 All-Star Game out of the city.