If you've lived, worked and played in Oakland County for the majority of your life as I have, you might think you know a few things about the city and county you call home.

I'm brave enough to admit today I knew nothing 14 months ago. Of course, I thought I did, but as I researched my football and subsequent basketball book more and more, I discovered my knowledge base was lacking. Over the past 14 months, I've learned so much about the city of Detroit, Oakland, Wayne and Macomb counties and our metro region as a whole. My sports knowledge has blossomed and my working knowledge from a socioeconomic standpoint is greatly expanded, too.

Here's what stands out to me today: Oakland County has a long way to go to catch up to other cities and counties in basketball prowess. If you think that's mean-spirited, baseless or otherwise foolish to say, consider what Oakland County's basketball history would look like without Pontiac Northern or Detroit Country Day. When Pontiac Central closes in a few months, a significant chunk of the county's basketball cache will close with it.

Ferndale won a pair of championships under Roy Burkhart in the 1960s. Berkley had some good teams under Steve Rhoades, none better than the 25-0 edition with Bruce Flowers in the mid-1970s. Those Bears lost in the Class A quarterfinals to Pontiac Central, the farthest any Berkley team has ever advanced. The Chiefs went to four title games without bringing home winner's hardware. Southfield had some great teams, including the school's 1983 team that lost to Detroit Southwestern and Antoine Joubert's 44-point effort in the Class A semifinals. Their rival, Southfield-Lathrup, has also had a handful of great seasons in girls and boys' games alike, and save for the last two minutes of the Class A final about 15 years ago, the Chargers could have had a title in boys' basketball, too.

Obviously Pontiac Northern has earned a couple of titles as have the Eaglets of Orchard Lake St. Mary's. Country Day in girls and boys' basketball is a champion many times over along with Mary Lillie-Cicerone's Birmingham Marian teams. Her Mustangs have earned four titles in five finals appearances while neighboring Brother Rice had some good teams under Bill Norton in the 1970s.

There's a small handful of champions I'm omitting but you get the point. At face value that aforementioned list looks pretty good, right? But compared to Detroit, Flint or Saginaw, Oakland County schools, particularly the public schools, are seen within the MHSAA record books as often as the signs that tell you you're still 200+ miles from the Mackinac Bridge. Every so often you see an Oakland County school in the finals or semifinals. And before you get mad, understand that Macomb County's public schools are practically non-existent in this discussion.

What surprises me is one would think with the affluence in Oakland County, the ability to pay for and play AAU, quality coaching, gyms and weight rooms, Oakland County would have a better history. But money can't buy love, as I've heard more than once, and Oakland County school populations love football and baseball a lot more than they love roundball.

However, it's not all negative. Even as rumors swirl of the OAA's potential demise, one must look at the OAA and admit its' role in improving basketball in the O-C. The OAA gave Oakland County a look at Clarkston, Lake Orion and the two Pontiac schools on an annual basis. It forced the county's public schools as a whole to play a different brand of basketball.

Coaches familiar with the 'city game' have been populating Oakland County schools for the past 10-15 years. Not surprisingly, the tenor, tempo and energy of the game changed, too. Finally, when the OAA hired Mike Smith away from the PSL to assign games, the league gained officials who called a tougher, more physical game. It forced soft fouls and soft play out of the OAA. It also opened doors for an entire pool of officials who previously had not intermingled the two leagues to one another.

Obviously I'm starting to touch on some issues that get away from basketball and delve into culture and habit, so we'll stop here. It will be a fun last six weeks of the regular season. Can Clarkston continue an amazing season? Will Pontiac Central offer a final memory for her faithful fans? Pontiac Northern's final season as the Huskies is at hand, too. Will private schools like Country Day and Marian be holding hardware to end their season? Can any other Oakland County team step up and steal glory from a perennial contender?

Here's to a final six weeks of fastbreak, break-neck basketball!

~T.C. Cameron is the author of Metro Detroit's High School Football Rivalries from Arcadia Publishing. Cameron's 2nd title, Metro Detroit's High School Basketball Rivalries, is due August 2009.

With apologies to those I've kept in the dark (that's you, M.L.), here's the skinny on the trivia question I offered for five free books at my signing this past Thursday at the Bloomfield Hills Barnes & Noble.

Question No. 1: What metro Detroit high school did Al Fracassa coach at before assuming the football fortunes at Birmingham Brother Rice?

Fracassa was also the coach for the Knights of Royal Oak's Shrine High School in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Surprised? With Jim Manilla at Royal Oak High in the late 50s, and his stable of assistants that included 'Pin' Ryan, 'Ivy' Loftin, Paul Temerian and Frank Joranko, Royal Oak was a football hotspot during the high school sock-hop era.

In '62, Fracassa's Knights were 6-1-1. They tallied wins over notables like Detroit Holy Redeemer (15-0), Redford St, Mary's (19-0) and a 27-6 win over newly-opened Birmingham Groves. Shrine tied Detroit Servite in a 20-point stalemate for both teams. The only loss for Shrine was a 25-6 setback to Grosse Pointe St. Ambrose, which leads us to the conclusion of Question No. 2.

Question No. 2: What metro Detroit high school did George Perles lead before his days with the Pittsburgh Steelers and later, the Michigan State Spartans?

Perles was head coach at Grosse Pointe's St. Ambrose High. In '62, Perles and his Cavaliers went a perfect 9-0 in marching to the Catholic League championship and Goodfellows Game title. In that Goodfellows Game, St. Ambrose blanked the 8-0 Cardinals of Detroit Cooley, 19-0, on the floor of Tiger Stadium. It was the second-straight domination at 'The Corner' that day, because hours earlier, the Detroit Lions manhandled the previously-undefeated Green Bay Packers 26-14 in the now-famous Thanksgiving Day Massacre. The Lions sacked Hall-Of-Fame quarterback Bart Starr 11 times before the Cavaliers sacked Cooley's state championship dreams.

The state's Associated Press poll rewarded St. Ambrose, which closed in the spring of 1972, with the No. 3 ranking in the final Class B poll of '62. Also of note in Class B that year was West Bloomfield (7-0-1), which earned the 6th position, followed by Dearborn Divine Child (8th / 8-0) and Clawson High's Trojans, 10th with a record of 7-1.

Despite the loss, Detroit Cooley was awarded the No. 4 slot in the Class A poll in '62. Frank Joranko's Ferndale Eagles were sixth with the identical 8-1 record Ferndale High achieved this season. Hamtramck's Cosmos were 9th with a 7-1 slate and Seaholm was 10th at 8-1. Ann Arbor's Pioneer was the state champion in Class A for 1962.

The Fabulous Falcons! Perhaps the best story to emerge from the 2008 high school football season statewide might be the Farmington High Falcons. On September 12, Farmington was humiliated in a 63-0 loss to Rochester Adams High School, the Falcons' 15th-consecutive loss dating back to a 7-0 loss to Royal Oak's Ravens, coached by Terry Powers, on Oct 13, 2006.

I can't state for certain if it's ever happened before, because I don't have the time to go through the records of nearly 800 high schools, some closed many years ago, dating back to 1975, but I would imagine the list of schools who have lost 15 consecutive games in any stretch of seasons and found enough wins in any season to a) break the streak and b) make the playoffs is a short one.

In fact, if I were a betting man, and I'm not, I would say it's probably never happened before.

To pen a story that details 15 straight losses, capped by a 63-0 loss, followed by six-straight wins, including the school's first win over Farmington Hills Harrison in 31 seasons and a win over rival North Farmington to earn a state playoff berth, would probably get most Hollywood script writers laughed into the circular file.

Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction but no matter what happens to the Falcons in the playoffs, Farmington's revival is one of the great stories of Michigan's 2008-09 scholastic year.

If I said Brad Cochran fundamentally changed the Michigan High School Athletic Association and switched sports 30 years before the MHSAA was forced to do so under the weight of a federal judgment, you might expect a more detailed story.

Let me explain. And no, Cochran doesn't live in Grand Rapids.

I spent last Saturday at West Bloomfield High School, watching Birmingham Brother Rice advance to the Division I regional this weekend at Birmingham Seaholm. During the final I spent some time talking with longtime Birmingham Groves baseball coach and teacher Jim Crosby along the left field foul line. We talked about the many years Crosby and longtime assistant Phil Roy have coached at Groves. Later, as we recalled the MHSAA's transfer rules were born when Cochran's parents enrolled their son at Rice for the 1980 season, Crosby's eyes lit up.

"Did you know Brad Cochran was a cross country runner at Royal Oak Dondero when he was a freshman?" Crosby asked with equal part smirk and smile. I was already surprised when Crosby told me he had been a cross country coach at Groves, but a high school freshman running five miles races and starting at defensive back in the Big Ten a handful of years later? Brad Cochran was All-Big Ten at the University of Michigan, earned All-American honors and was the 3rd round pick in the 1986 National Football League draft of the Oakland Raiders.

Are you kidding me?

When you think of names from the running circuit of south Oakland County, you think of guys like Birmingham's Kermit Ambrose. Hazel Park's Jack Broughton and Dan Lutkus come to mind quickly, and Dick Zulch, too. Trust me, I was shocked, and I like to think I know a little prep football history. Most kids who run cross country have as much chance of becoming Big Ten football heroes as the kid playing tuba in the marching band has at becoming the next Tom Brady or Broadway Joe Namath.

I ought to know -- I was a skinny track guy in high school.

"It's true. I remember the races we saw him at," Crosby said of his time coaching the harriers. "Brad Cochran was a tall, lanky kid who hadn't filled out. He was about 6'2" without any meat on him. Of course, the next year we saw him on the football field and he had turned into a man among boys. He was filled out and was a natural for football."

The MHSAA's transfer rules were, for many years, nicknamed The Brad Cochran Rule among the media covering prep sports statewide because of Cochran's sudden transfer. It wasn't the first time a Royal Oak kid had spurned the public school. When I cornered John Wangler at last season's Michigan-Michigan State football game media event, I boldly told John, "If you had gone to Kimball instead of Shrine, Paul Temerian would have won three state titles!" Wangler laughed and diplomatically offered, "I would have loved to play for Coach Temerian!"

We then both laughed because Wangler would have thrown the ball about four times a game if he had gone to Kimball, where running the football was the alpha and omega of the playbook. Wangler would have been the greatest prep quarterback to ever hand a football off a million times consecutively - that would have been a shame.

Brad Cochran was different. He could return punts and kicks. He covered opponents like a glove, and was big, fast and strong. Playing under head coach Ivy Loftin, the '78 Dondero team finished a game behind league champion Birmingham Groves at 4-1 in the Metro Suburban Activities Association (MSAA) and 6-3 overall, but the season ended bitterly with a 14-0 setback to Southeastern Michigan Association (SMA) champion Kimball. In '79, with Cochran as a junior captain, Dondero marched to the MSAA title, going 5-0 in league after opening the season with wins over Ferndale and Hazel Park. At 7-0, Dondero was ranked as high as No. 2 in the state and primed to earn their first playoff invite. But the Oaks stumbled in a 14-12 loss at Cass Field to their former Thanksgiving Day rivals, Birmingham Seaholm.

The next week, playing 4-4 Kimball, Cochran hauled in a 23-yard touchdown pass for Dondero's first score on the game's opening possession. That would be Dondero's lone highlight - Kimball trounced the Oaks by three scores, 27-6, in front of an upset-minded rival crowd. This loss specifically drove Cochran's parents to seek out a different option for their son. They were upset that no scouting and no film prep had been put into The Oak Stump game, a game that, if won, could have salvaged the season and possibly still earned Dondero a playoff berth.

The next year Cochran was proudly wearing the orange and black of Brother Rice. With no transfer rules to stop him, Brad Cochran joined future Big Ten players Paul Jokisch and Dave Yarema in taking Rice to a 12-0 slate and the season's Class A title. The Warriors outscored their opponents 345-74. They topped Sterling Heights Stevenson in the quarters 25-13, and defeated Detroit Central's Trailblazers 49-12 in the semifinal. In the Pontiac Silverdome, Yarema found Yokisch for a touchdown late in the 4th quarter to give Rice a 6-0 win over Dearborn Fordson, completing an undefeated, championship season.

In the months to follow the transfer rules were drafted and later enacted. In every MHSAA membership bulletin since, those affiliated with the state's prep association can read the minutes and details of the many requests to waive the transfer regulations, month after month, and often with little success.

Today, Cochran doesn't hate Dondero. He doesn't hate Kimball, either, where his brother, Brett, played football for both George Hanoian and recently-retired Terry Powers. Cochran still gets his hair cut at the Kimball Barber Shop, where Tiger broadcaster Paul Carey visited regularly for nearly 20 years when he lived in Royal Oak.

Thirty years ago, an All-State football player was a cross country runner at a different school. The one-time runner, turned footballer and head-turning transfer, became a state champion, All-American and NFL draft pick. He broke hearts, leaving one big school for another, and changed the high school landscape we live in today.

That was Brad Cochran.

(Photo courtesy of The Oakland Press)

~T.C. Cameron is the author of Metro Detroit's High School Football Rivalries, due August 25th, 2008 from Arcadia Publishing