Two head coaches, at least they’re head coaches at the moment, and one of them has received a special award and one of them needs to.

Coby Gibson, Head Coach of Howard Payne University football, with a record of I think 4-6, has been named Coach of The Year in their Conference, the American Southwest Conference. That’s a shock! That Conference used to simply say if you win enough that’s it, you win the league championship and you get the Coach of the Year and stuff like that. In a four team or five team Conference which Howard Payne is in at the moment, Coby was named Coach of the Year. He finished next to last in Conference play. I can’t tell you how big of a deal that is. I for one am thrilled that Howard Payne is in a Conference that does it this way. If people like you and you impress them with your work ethic, then you’re probably going to get the award. It does not go to the one who wins the most ballgames which it shouldn’t, but it’s the one that does the best job and I think Coby did as good as anybody. Congrats to him! I look forward to next year and hopefully another championship run for the Yellow Jackets.

Moving to the high school side, my pick – personally – my pick for Coach of the Year in the District that we play in is Jeryl Brixey. Brixey is a terrific football coach. I really don’t know the guy that well and I barely know him at all, but I know this much, he did a heck of a job! I for one after the first two games when we were 0-2, it’s very possible these are the only two games we win, maybe three, but championship, no, not any championship. It’s turned out we had one which was a great game at Brownwood against Lampasas. We won that thing by a touchdown and it was a terrific ballgame and a terrific performance by Brixey. The team continued to grow.

This was a team that scared me to death. Most of the time they scared me like the 51-7 win over Big Spring. It was a dominant performance by a Brownwood team that hadn’t showed much of anything all year. But Brixey won it and that gave him a game up on Lampasas. Stephenville walked over everyone to win the league championship. Brownwood did the best that they could do. They finished second and played Big Spring in the playoffs and got shut out in the first quarter.

In the next game they got shut out in the first and second quarters before rallying, and I mean rallying, to almost erase that margin of victory that Canyon had over us. It was 24-0 in the third quarter. Brownwood rallied and cut it to 24-7 and it turns out that a call was made in the first half and it wiped out a close to 60 yard run by Buffington and Brownwood had the ball and was fighting back at 14-0. They should have been down 14-7 had the touchdown stood, which it should have. Brixey said later in the ballgame that the official apologized for the call. It was just a wrong call so it should have been a seven point swing for Brownwood in the second quarter and they should have been down 17-7 or something like that, and if the official had called it right it would have been a tie game at best at the end of the ballgame and we would have had a shot at winning it. But so it goes. Sometimes it goes your way and sometimes it doesn’t.

I can’t get over the job that Brixey did in the ballgame itself. Brixey turned out to be a good coach and this is with a ball club that had a lot of flaws. He will get better, better next year, better going forward.

So, that’s the way I see it. Brixey did a good job at Brownwood and went 7-5 and I can’t wait until next year because it will be better!

Congrats again to Coby Gipson, Head Coach at HPU and Jeryl Brixey, the Head Coach at Brownwood. I’m proud to have both of them on my team!

Until next time, so long everybody.

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‘Out of the Box’ with Dallas Huston is published each Monday morning at BrownwoodNews.com. Dallas was the radio voice of the Brownwood Lions and Howard Payne Yellow Jackets for more than 55 years. He currently is Pastor of Center City Baptist Church and hosts a Men’s Bible Study in Brownwood on Monday evenings. Your comments are welcome at [email protected].