Football musings ...

It’s been the question on everyone’s mind this week: What’s going on at Paducah Tilghman?

The wild week that was in Tornadoland has football fans wondering if Tilghman will experience a meltdown similar to last season, when it finished 2-8 (including a forfeit loss for the use of an ineligible player) and missed the playoffs for the first time since 1984.

Gleaning together information from various sources, this is what we know:

Head coach Randy Wyatt met with parents, players and school administrators on Thursday afternoon and expressed contrition for some statements he has made to the team in recent days, especially in the aftermath of last week’s 21-12 loss to Mayfield.

Wyatt, in his second season as the Tornado’s head coach, doesn’t back down from the fact that he often takes a “tough love” approach to coach-player relationships — it’s a style that he feels worked well for his high school coach, Allan Cox, and one he experienced when he spent a couple of years playing for Howard Schnellenberger at the University of Louisville.

Unfortunately, some of those methods don’t always set too well in today’s society. And it apparently didn’t work well for three key players, all of whom left the team this week.

Among them are Kirk Sanderson, a 6-foot-4, 280-pound senior and a four-year starter on the offensive line. John Meza, a 275-pound senior, started the first two games at right tackle.

Linebacker Jim Hank also started as a freshman and has been battling a hip problem that will require surgery, although sources indicate his decision to leave the program isn’t entirely because of his medical issues.

Clearly, when players of that stripe choose to leave the program in midstream, there is some kind of disconnect between player and coach. This also seemed to be an issue last season, when the Tornado imploded after a promising start.

For whatever reason, be it coaching or discipline issues or some combination thereof, Tilghman has been a big-time underachiever since the start of last season, going 4-9 on the field. A team that should have been playing in the state semifinals for the second consecutive year never got to the postseason in Wyatt’s first year at the helm, and the second season is off to a 1-2 start that includes a fourth-quarter collapse against a Hopkinsville team that appears to be that program’s least talented team in at least a decade or two.

What’s in store for Tilghman the rest of the season? Who the heck knows? But tonight’s visit to Graves County should provide us with a few clues.

• Unbeaten Tigers?: There is growing sentiment that Murray could finish with the school’s first perfect regular season, and it wouldn’t come as a shock if the Tigers were 12-0 with two-time defending state champion Fort Campbell rolling into Ty Holland Stadium for a third-round contest in the Class 2A playoffs.

The biggest obstacle to the milestone season would have been Mayfield, which looks like a top contender in Class A. Head coaches from both programs — Murray’s Steve Duncan and Mayfield’s Joe Morris — have confirmed that the two teams discussed renewing their dormant series, one of the oldest in western Kentucky, but neither team could find an open date in common.

As it stands, a season-ending tilt with Crittenden County, a top-five team in the Class A rankings, might be Murray’s deepest pothole on the road to perfection.

• Back in the saddle: Lone Oak coach Jack Haskins has been working from atop the press box in the Purple Flash’s easy wins over Ballard Memorial, Reidland and Marshall County, but he expects to be back on the sideline for tonight’s game with Lexington Catholic.

“You can see a lot more stuff up in the sky,” Haskins said, “but it’s frustrating because you can’t have face-to-face conversations with your players. I haven’t done that in my head coaching career. The only time I did was when I was an assistant at Paducah Tilghman (from 1989-1996).”

Haskins had surgery in late summer to repair a blockage in the carotid artery in the right side of his neck. Part of the reason for his being in the press box was to avoid the risk of taking a hit on the sideline.

“I can’t yell as much as I normally do, either,” Haskins said. “Some of the kids probably like that.”

• Around the horn: A Reidland win over Webster County would give the Greyhounds a rare two-game winning streak, something that hasn’t happened since the 2005 season ... Heath is trying to extend a two-game winning streak against Jo Byrns, a school east of Clarksville that was the Tennessee Class A state runner-up last fall. The Pirates haven’t put together back-to-back-to-back wins since a four-game streak early in the 2005 season.