For all the nay-saying and negative news pouring out of Michigan these days, there's still a lot to brag about in our state. We still have the charter game of the marquee weekend in pro football's regular season with the Thanksgiving Day matinee. Yes, the Detroit Lions haven't been compelling theater in nearly three consecutive presidential terms, but I'll address that later.

Following the annual Turkey Day game, the Michigan High School Athletic Association holds it's yearly football finals at Ford Field, another Michigan tradition since the mid-to-late 1970s at the Pontiac Silverdome. There was a tremendous crowd for yesterday's Lake Orion - Rockford matchup, the gold stamp contest among eight different championship games over Friday and Saturday. I would guesstimate the assembled masses at near 20,000 for the Division I final, and I'm surprised it wasn't significantly more.

I'm surprised because we've all heard so much about our dying economy's terrifying effects of the last nearly two years. There's thousands of houses in foreclosure, jobs literally evaporating, credit virtually impossible to secure, the list is endless. Yet the Lions, at 0-11 and practically begging for people to buy tickets, get a sellout on Thanksgiving at over $40 a ticket and parking around the stadium going for $50 a car. The MHSAA? Despite the great turnout, they still had seats to spare in the endzones of the lower bowl in Ford Field. For the cost of a $10 ticket, a fan gets four games and parking locked in at $6 per car at a handful of lots, making the day-long experience of four games at Ford Field less than dinner for two at a coney island.

I'm very surprised that more fans don't take advantage of the incredible value that is the MHSAA football finals. Yes, this is a Lions town and Detroit fans have supported their team in even the most head-turning times (for example, this year, right?), so that much I understand. It's this loyalty that makes Detroit one of the nation's great sports towns.

I've sometimes been critical of the MHSAA, like many coaches, administrators, fans and fellow officials have been on many different issues. That's life. Sometimes my writing and refereeing is seen as dead-on and other times it's viewed with a less complimentary eye. After two years of attending the football finals in two different capacities, I'm floored at how effective a small army of dedicated athletic administrators, aka the MHSAA, are at transforming a mammoth, 65,000-seat facility that earned a SuperBowl and a Final Four into an incredible experience for 16 competing schools and all the marching bands, cheer squads, pom-pon teams and dance corps that accompany the championship teams. The MHSAA is to be applauded for that.

Last year I volunteered as a down box linesman for two of the eight games, and this year I covered the Lake Orion - Rockford matchup for The Oakland Press. You can read my championship game sidebar story that ran in today's edition here, and the Lake Orion - Dearborn Fordson retrospective that ran last week is linked here. I've often wondered aloud why the MHSAA doesn't share it's championship experience with a greater pool of officials, and the MHSAA has begun to address this very issue in a more proactive manner. Yet after this weekend, I can say with absolute conviction that Michigan's football finals is an incredible experience in a mesmerizing venue and it's something anyone associated with prep football should support in earnest. That might mean pushing hard to earn a finals assignment as a contest official, or volunteer as an administrator or coach, or simply purchase a few tickets and bring the family.

It's really an incredible undertaking and one that is done for the kids, which makes it all the more remarkable in today's economic climate. There are game site options available to the MHSAA that would be much more cost-friendly than Ford Field. The MHSAA gets no discount to play their championship at the Lions' facility because to Ford Field, it's just another date that could be booked with a different event, and you don't stay in business giving your product away all the time. There's no media discount either -- the cost to hook up to Ford Field's BlueZone internet service on a per day, per reporter basis was $30, the same as a Lions game. Yet the finals continue to be held at the state's premiere facility because our Michigan schools, stocked by Michigan families, expect no less of an experience than the generation before them, and the MHSAA is committed to delivering on that promise.

Our state's communities get a SuperBowl-quality experience in a SuperBowl venue -- and how many prep football fans around the country can say that?

~ T.C. Cameron is writing Metro Detroit's High School Basketball Rivalries, due in August 2009 from Arcadia Publishing.

I'm officially on a mission to kill a word, a word that isn't really a word but one that, nonetheless, manages to be misused, overused and has become an icon of the cheesy television announcer guy.

Trickeration. It's not even a damn word!

Don't believe me? Check it out yourself at Dictionary.com: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/trickeration

Nobody's a worse offender than ESPN's Reese Davis, with the constant 'trickeration' references that dot the blizzard of college football highlights on any given Saturday. How has this non-word become a word so synonymous with any number of football gadget plays is beyond me.

What really gnaws at me isn't that the word is used so much as much as who transformed the pseudo-word into an accepted part of college football vernacular. Real journalists from real journalism schools! No, not the meatheads and ex-jocks that have managed to infiltrate the press box, but rather the writers, reporters and media professionals made this non-entry in any working dictionary into a word that's not yet a real word.

Clearly, the writer in me is getting the best of me, whatever that 'best' is...

No 'Trickeration' Needed For Lake Orion: I was as shocked as anyone at the ease and precision the Lake Orion Dragons executed with in dismantling undefeated Dearborn Fordson. The Tractors had run on everyone and anyone -- at will -- until the semifinal matchup at Troy Athens.

The Dragons looked they were breathing fire -- not cold air -- in the ferocity with which they attacked Fordson, who looked frustrated and thoroughly confused from the jump in Orion's 38-0 runaway win. Even the first play, a Fordson pass, was a runaway train going the other way in the form of an intercepted pass returned for a score, not that I saw it. I was walking up to the stadium, filled with about 7,500 fans -- a beautiful sight -- and it was already 7-0 before 30 seconds elapsed from the game clock.

By the way, let me echo Tom Markowski, who joined myself and Oakland Press guru Keith Dunlap in the cozy confines of the press box at Athens, in saying athletic director Bob Dowd and Athens did a fabulous job hosting their third-straight semifinals. Parking is plentiful, ingress and egress to and from the school campus is accomodating and the facility is first-rate. I think Athens should be an easy choice to join Ferndale's Division I (formerly Class A) boys' quarterfinal in Oakland County as an annual site for an annual playoff game.

As for the upcoming championships, Lake Orion and Warren De LaSalle have a chance to deliver the two marquee championships to the metropolitan area, the east side of the state, in a year when it looked like the west side of the state would run away any and all hardware available to the statewide contingency of schools offering football. That and it'll be interesting to see if Detroit Country Day has learned anything from their runners-up defeat last year towards winning a championship.

Book's For Sale At Ford Field: Copies of Metro Detroit's High School Football Rivalries will be available at the Michigan High School Athletic Association's football finals at Ford Field on Friday and Saturday.

A portion of the proceeds will benefit Officials For Kids, the charitable arm of the MHSAA's corp of registered officials.

Come watch some great football -- $10 gets you four games and two locals schools each day -- and buy the book as a gift for you or someone else and most importantly, help some kids who deserve it more than anything else!

The book will be parked by the Lighthouse Sportswear station in the main atrium and will be advertised on the LED scoreboards during the games!

~ T.C. Cameron is the author of Metro Detroit's High School Basketball Rivalries, a follow-up of Metro Detroit's High School Football Rivalries, and blogs for The Oakland Press at www.MIPrepZone.com

I read this morning that Avondale High School football coach Steven Deutsch was quoted in today's Detroit Free Press as saying no one plays defense in high school football anymore. The Yellow Jackets defeated tough-luck Hazel Park this past Friday with a 34-yard touchdown on the game's final play by a 53-52 count. That 100+ point tally was one of a handful of near triple-digit games this past weekend in metro Detroit.

I'm not certain that's true as much as high school football has evolved with the collegiate game in leaps and bounds on the offensive side of the ball. Power-I formations? Yeah, right. Off-tackle? Maybe once in a while. More and more, though, it's traps, sweeps, veer and several variations that feature and specialize in the single-wing offense. Nowadays, when you see four-to-five receiver sets, I half prepare for a run or short screen to a halfback as an official working the wing or in the back judge's position.

The bottom line is prep defenses can no longer gear to stop the run or pass exclusively, and with the proliferation of passing camps, quarterback schools, weight, speed and skill training, how can a defense keep up with the expansion of the typical offensive playbook, multiplied by the power of three, in high school football today?

Fight The Good Fight? An ugly donnybrook nearly came to fruition this past Saturday before the kickoff of a small college football game when the home team and visiting team were both waiting to take the field, poised from opposite endzones. By rule, when both teams refuse to go onto the field before their opponent, the home team is required to go first. So the hosts thundered onto the turf, went 100 yards into the opposite endzone and engaged in a testosterone-powered shout-down with their opponents that was quickly addressed by all seven officials.

No fists were thrown and one 15-yard unsportsmanlike foul was assessed to start the game, plus a delay-of-game before the game's first kickoff legally took place. Thankfully both teams marched to early touchdowns. That was important because once the game was tied 7-7, both teams settled down into a rhythm. However, that start was the precursor to 20 more penalties before the clock read 0:00.

That's the reality of officiating a hotly-contested game with first place on the line.

Forfeit Ends Polar Bear Season: Highland Park High was a no-show on Friday night at Dearborn Edsel Ford last week. This meant no walk-up ticket sales, concession money, program or spirit gear sales, either. Hopefully it wasn't homecoming for the Thunderbirds, which would be the end of a lot of memories for the Edsel Ford student body as well.

It could be called admirable that Highland Park head coach Cedric Dortch had the stones to make a tough decision to deliver a message, but in these economic times, that money is vital for some of these schools and the memories of a high school football season's game cannot be replaced, either. The coach's decision was reported within this morning's edition of The Detroit News.
I never like forfeits in high school football. One, finding a replacement game in nearly impossible for the offended school. Two, the money that one home football game generates cannot be found elsewhere.

Ironically, all three forfeited games remaing on the Highland Park schedule to end the season will either grant or greatly improve playoff chances for the three offended schools.
Edsel Ford qualified for the playoffs in back-to-back seasons for the first time in school history with the awarded victory on Friday, their sixth of the season. The Thunderbirds entered the game 5-1. Ypsilanti, Highland Park's Week Eight opponent, now sit at 5-3 with the forfeit win, and will have a chance to qualify for the playoffs if the purple 'n gold can defeat Dexter's Dreadnaughts (1-6 so far) in Week Nine.

Dearborn Fordson, ranked somewhere in the top five of nearly every state divisional classification poll after the Tractors' 24-14 win over rival Dearborn High, will end the season undefeated if they can beat the undefeated Southgate Anderson Titans this Friday in a huge match-up to decide the Mega Red championship. Because Highland Park was the Tractor opponent for Week Nine, Fordson is nearly guaranteed at least one home game in the playoffs no matter the result this Friday.

~ T.C. Cameron is the author of Metro Detroit's High School Football Rivalries, and is working on a follow-up title, Metro Detroit's High School Basketball Rivalries!

I'll be presenting an interactive Image of Sports presentation tomorrow night at the Dearborn Public Library Main Branch (Michigan Avenue), starting at 7pm. After the program, I'll be signing copies of my book, Metro Detroit's High School Football Rivalries. The program's beneficiary is the library itself.

Not doing anything on a ho-hum Wednesday evening? Come join me! I'll have pictures and images of all four Dearborn high schools. Has there been a better season of recent memory in Dearborn? I think not. With Fordson at 6-0 , Edsel Ford and Dearborn and Divine Child at 4-2, all four schools have positioned themselves to make the Michigan High School Athletic Association playoffs. These are never-seen-before pictures and images representing the rich history of the Pioneers, Falcons, Tractors and Thunderbirds!

Come check out the new table skirt with all the varsity letters on it! Have one to donate? Come on up! The Dearborn Public Library is on Michigan Avenue due east from the Southfield Freeway across from Ford Motor Company and nestled in with the Dearborn Police Department and the city's Amtrak station.

~T.C. Cameron is the author of Metro Detroit's High School Football Rivalries, available for purcahse and signing this Wednesday, October 8th at the Dearborn Public Library. Show starts at 7pm!

Yesterday a 40-year-old Dearborn, Michigan man who e-mailed two separate death threats within one minute of each other against ultra-conservative columnist and over-exposed blogger Debbie Schlussel was sentenced to eight months in prison.

That's good, right? Right! Here's hoping that the rest of the community, in Dearborn and anywhere else in the 50 great states and the District of Columbia knows that freedom of speech is protected in this great country, even when free speech is exercised by those who abuse it.

I'll admit Schlussel speaks the truth about many issues when it comes to the extremists and radicals from the East that have declared war by any means necessary in the West and anyone who assimilates life in the West. She's also as rambunctious and over-the-top as any warlord has ever been portrayed, and when she portrayed Dearborn's Fordson High School as 'Hezbollah High', she specifically drew my ire. I thought she was being grossly unfair and I e-mailed the Michigan native and University of Michigan graduate. I didn't get so much as a 'No Thanks'.

Schlussel points to the school's principal, a person she paints as radicalist-friendly. Schlussel goes on to identify all of Fordson with this label because she's 'discovered' that some of the Arab community at Dearborn Fordson have ties to terrorist organizations, although not all methods of discovery have been disclosed. When the school's wrestling coach was fired last year for cause due to a religious disagreement, Schlussel hung the hateful moniker around the school's neck.

Now it's my turn.

Is Fordson's community squeaky clean, upstanding and beyond reproach? I don't know. Is Fordson a pit of lawless, angry war lords hiding behind religion to further a directive of destruction against America? I don't know that, either.

What I do know is that Fordson is a place where school spirit soars. It's a place that seems to field a lot of good teams, year after year, in many different sports. The Tractors have been good for over 80 years, spanning the school's early all-white, European-based population to the days from 1950-1980 when it was a mix of Poles, Italians, English and Arab to today's near-exclusive population of Arab and Muslim students. In researching Metro Detroit's High School Football Rivalries, I discovered that Fordson has as faithful and passionate a following as any school. This group is not bound by age, religion, gender or economic status. They're bound by their common heritage as Fordson Tractors.

I do know that a lot of good teachers, coaches and administrators care a great deal about Fordson High. They care about their students, about their school's reputation and their ability to mold a lot of different kids into graduates potential of success beyond the football field, algebra or the school yearbook, the Fleur De Lis.

Doesn't sound like a place that perpetrates hate if you ask me.

So what am I, or anyone for that matter, to think of terrorist ties? Am I to believe that because Fordson has been labeled as 'Hezbollah High' that this type of link is only to be assumed at Fordson? Does anyone really believe that just one school, one restaurant or one office in the metropolitan area can be linked to terrorism? I suppose because 9/11 terrorists flew out of Boston's Logan Airport that terrorism can be sufficiently linked to the entire Boston airport? Of course not.

And what if a teacher is found to be embezzling funds, like what happened in the mid-1990s where I went to school? Does that mean we should have renamed the school as Enron High? What of sexual assault? Does that mean we rename a school as Pedophile Preparatory? I'm not saying all the students and faculty at Fordson, or any other high school for that matter, is of upstanding conviction. What I am saying is labeling an entire high school like Fordson as 'Hezbollah High' is completely irresponsible for a journalist of any ilk.

And despite Schlussel's impressive credentials, education and credits, when a blogger takes a hateful position like Schlussel has, bloggers everywhere are discredited as a whole rather than in part. I've written some things that have been unpopular, but I've never hung that label on any entity.

Why? I'm simply not that irresponsible.

Schlussel is brilliant, intelligent writer and reporter who, sadly, sprinkles a healthy amount of hate and labels it as passion into her work as it relates to Fordson High School, and a Dearborn native, albeit wrong to threaten her life to be certain, let Schlussel know that calling Fordson 'Hezbollah High' won't get her invited to the Tractors' homecoming.

~ T.C. Cameron is the author of Metro Detroit's High School Football Rivalries, and is working on a follow-up title, Metro Detroit's High School Basketball Rivalries!

During the last two weeks it's become common knowledge to prep sports fans in metro Detroit that the MEGA Conference, a Wayne County-based power conference, will disband, and many an Oakland County HS athletic director is watching -- and taking notes, too.

It's no secret that athletic budgets, compatibility and competitive balance concerns are on the hot seat in the monster-like, 20+ school athletic conferences that make up the bulk of prep sports leagues in the three-county area. What garnered a lot of attention was the news that Dearborn High was a candidate to join the Kensington Lakes Activities Association (KLAA).

Here's some aspects to consider about why Dearborn, and not Garden City, became a serious candidate for the KLAA.

Parker's A No-Go: It doesn't appear the recently-completed but yet-to-be opened Howell Parker High School will open anytime soon. In fact, it appears the Howell School District cannot open the building at all due to serious budget constraints and a possible miscalculation of population growth in the community. The fact that the district is negotiating a movie contract deal to use the school as a movie set tells you all there is to know about the possibility Parker opens anytime soon.

Garden City Enrollment: The monstrous schools in the KLAA and Garden City are a mismatch. Albeit a fine community with much to offer any league, Garden City would struggle to match up with the expanding populations in Hartland, Brighton, Lakeland, Milford and South Lyon. Dearborn is a still-teeming community with equal distribution among the three big schools, making Dearborn a better choice for a long-term membership.

Fordson - Dearborn Relations: In researching Metro Detroit's High School Football Rivalries, I found a handful of instances when Dearborn High and Fordson didn't play a football game for many years at a time due to conflict between building/district administrators or coaches. In fact, Edsel Ford and Fordson shared the same track & field facility recently when Fordson was having renovations done to their iconic campus. A Dearborn city official told me off the record, "If anyone thinks that Fordson would have been offered to use Dearborn's track, they're delusional. The schools simply don't like one another." Dearborn Superintendent Brian Whiston had to unconditionally guarantee Fordson that the Dearborn game would be available to them before Dearborn could be allowed to seek a different league affiliation.

Royal Oak Made It Work: The two schools, Dearborn & Fordson, might not be a good fit to one another as league members. Now-closed Kimball and Dondero were in the Southeastern Michigan Association (SMA) and Metro Suburban Activities Association (MSAA) for many years and enjoyed almost 35 years of outstanding football rivalry without being in the same league, something that seems to befit Dearborn and Fordson. That was the genesis of the Oakland Activites Association (OAA), combining two leagues with competing schools from the same city in the same league, but it crushed the many local rivalries and enhancing just a chosen few. I mention Dondero because the Oaks used to a fierce Fordson rival when the Tractors and Oaks were in the old Border Cities League (BCL).

Therefore, just because geography makes more sense for Garden City to be in the KLAA, it might make the KLAA even better to have Dearborn in that league. Dearborn would make the KLAA a three-county conference and make for an outstanding cross-county game in many sports.

Former Detroit Tiger broadcaster Paul Carey told me he thought very highly of Ivy Loftin's Dondero football teams because they played Monroe, Dearborn Fordson, Wyandotte, Highland Park, Grosse Pointe HS -- a powerhouse before the North-South days -- and finally, after the rigors of the BCL, the season-ending game with crosstown Kimball. Conversely, place Dearborn in the KLAA today. They would have league games against the three Livonia schools (all playoff teams in '07), Wayne Memorial, the upstart Rockets from John Glenn and crossovers with schools like Howell, Milford, Lakeland or Novi. To top it off, the Pioneers could end the season with Dearborn Fordson.

That's a football schedule.

Edsel Ford Factor: What does concern me is the chance that Dearborn and Edsel Ford would stop playing one another -- that's not good, but in a three-school town, these kind of concerns come up quite a bit. I'm not certain there's a solution, either. On the other hand, because two of the three schools are moving to a manageable conference, this allows Edsel Ford and Fordson to play DC's Falcons a bit more in all sports.

It was great the past two seasons seeing the big crowd for the Fordson-DC football game although I'm sure the Falcons would have liked a different result. It would be my opinion that a matchup of Milford and Dearborn, or Dearborn and Catholic Central, would be of interest to prep fans, because it's the type of matchup that isn't seen much these days, thanks to the monster power conferences that have seemed to have outlived their usefulness.

~T.C. Cameron is the author of Metro Detroit's High School Football Rivalries, available at www.Amazon.com and other fine retailers.

This fall I'm going to be offering metro Detroit's prep football fans a breakdown of a specific rivalry game to coincide with each Friday of the season. I'll pick from a small handful of games that have long-standing implications in the communities that gear up for the annual game each year and write a feature about the game's history and some of the intricacies that the game features.

On the season's opening weekend for example, Livonia Stevenson plays Livonia Franklin, Dearborn Divine Child faces Dearborn Fordson and Hazel Park opposes Berkley. Did you know that Livonia Franklin won the state's first Class A football title and didn't return to the playoffs until last season? Were you aware that Hazel Park and Berkley played for a Little Brown Jug, the awarding of to the winner long discontinued, that currently is on display at Hazel Park's student atrium? Fordson and Divine Child is a rare, inter-city game that previous to last year was played just twice before.

That's just Week No. 1. There's the North-South War, the last year for Fordson-Monroe, The 40th Baseline Jug Game, The Boys Bowl and more! High school football in metro Detroit is loaded with great history and story lines and there's an entire season to get to it. It doesn't have to be that week's biggest game, just a game that means a lot to each school playing it. In short, a game that is as exhilarating to win as it is devastating to lose -- that's the alpha and omega of a great high school rivalry!

Thanks to the Detroit Sports Broadcasters Association for highlighting my book tonight on it's website. Of course, I wouldn't be living up to my end of the bargain if I didn't mention DSBA Lifetime Honorary Member Paul Carey, the lead man for Detroit's original high school football radio show, wrote the book's foreword. For years Carey hosted the Michigan High School Football Scoreboard Show on Detroit's 50,000-watt blowtorch, WJR, AM 760.

Often on any given Friday night Carey would have to first finish the Detroit Tiger game he broadcast with Ernie Harwell from Tiger Stadium, plow through the Tiger postgame show, race back to Midtown and put together WJR's SportsWrap show at 11:15 from the 'Golden Tower' of the Fisher Building and then compile all the scores for his football show's midnight broadcast. And before you discredit this, remember, there was no MHSAA.com, MLIVE.com or other resource mediums. It was the barely-faster-than-molasses Associated Press wire service and more than a few phone calls to The Detroit News, Detroit Free Press and the now-defunct Detroit Times, not to mention The Pontiac Press!

Finally, I've shored up some signings and will be announcing these signings later this week.

Thankfully, there's only a few more weeks until football!

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