Published January 23, 2009 08:11 pm
Tom Halliburton colulmn for Saturday, Jan 24
The Port Arthur News
PORT NECHES — Now that his coaching tenure has ended, and the applicants to replace him have been revealed, allow me to share some thoughts about this new stadium coordinator and attendance dude at Port Neches-Groves.
By this point in the column, Matt Burnett and his wife Lindy probably are examining it and saying “uh-oh.”
This 51-year-old former Port Neches altar boy completed 15 years as a head coach and athletic coordinator at a high-profile high school. He’s made an enormous amount of critics who paid their way into the stadiums. No doubt he’s irritated plenty of kids, parents, coaches in and outside of PN-G. And the Southeast Texas football world has heard and inspected many of Matt’s mistakes and shortcomings.
If you want to find a much better example for young men than Matt, you may have to look high and low. They may think they need a more wide-open, spunky flamboyant offense at PN-G. They surely think they need to win more games. But over the years, your ol’ Bubba here generally tended to sympathize Matt, as well as Larry Neumann and the football coaches in Port Arthur and Bridge City for this reason.
They are better off shooting straight with this area’s media because Golden Triangle high school football is and hopefully always will be a big deal. Matt tried to do exactly that, and year after year, his young men were great to interview and usually special on and off the field.
Matt reminded me more of an assistant coach than a head coach throughout his entire time at The Reservation. That’s not a criticism. It’s just a fact. Matt tried to feel, act and behave as if he coached the team right along with all the other assistants. He had to be the spokesman and he was not always comfortable in his skin at trying to do that.
There’s a large number of coaches who have come through PN-G who could do a lot worse than Matt Burnett. And most all of them did.
PN-G won five district football championships in 15 years under Matt. They went to the state finals in 1999. Quite a few area coaches were surprised to learn that PN-G felt it needed to make a change.
When the 37th annual Port Arthur News Super Team convened for the annual photographs and interviews, only one Indians found his way on the list. Coaches coach. Players play. Truly it is hard to convince many Mid-and-South County parents that their teen-agers are less talented than others, but the better teams usually have four or five players on this honor squad. PN-G had one.
A large handful of Matt’s critics could and would respond to PN-G’s most modest Super Team representation by saying that players are developed. Some no doubt would fault Matt for failing to develop more of them, especially in the passing game and at skill positions.
Burnett is a former defensive lineman. To this day, plenty of Matt’s best players were defensive linemen, too. Lindy will be proud to read that one of Matt’s very best players — pound for pound, inch for inch — was their son Clint.
I could not have been more proud of a father in a coach’s role than I was last year of Matt with Clint. As a coach, Matt did not try to do Clint that many special favors. Clint just earned his opportunities and made the most of them.
One of Burnett’s early teams fired so many duds on Friday nights that it compiled a 1-9 and 0-7 ledger. It may be a group that’s not near as fresh on the memories of Indians’ fans as this recent 3-6 and 1-6 mark. Here’s a couple of the fine individuals to play on that squad. A 315-pound offensive tackle named Chris Pachuca played on that team. Chris coached linemen at Vidor this fall. A 185-pound fullback named Jake LeFort started too. LeFort coached PN-G’s secondary this year. Apparently Matt had a positive impact on those two young men, too.
Then there was an offensive coordinator Mike Long and a son named Dustin about a decade ago. They did a lot to help Indians’ football under Burnett, too. Many would say they would distort just how much success PN-G had under Burnett. Bob West hailed in a 1999 column that Dustin Long had to be the best and most complete quarterback he had observed around Southeast Texas in three decades. I would concur.
Players play. Coaches coach. If PN-G had players, PN-G normally prospered year after year. Frequently, though, Burnett’s Indians had to overachieve. They accomplished exactly that with a team earlier in this decade that contained names such as Josh Cook, little Cory Villafano, and a very intelligent gentleman named Matt LeBlanc.
When it came to interesting young men, they didn’t get much better than Josh Thigpen or Leyton McElduff either.
Has Burnett’s luck always been the best? Absolutely not. One year (2005) his Indians missed the playoffs due to Hurricane Rita and a late-night coin toss after the end of the regular season. Another time his Indians lined up to kick a game-winning field goal on The Reservation.
A very reliable kicker accidentally booted it wide of the uprights. Fact was, Matt had the worst luck with kickers of any head coach that I ever have observed in 40 years. Kickers and Matt just never seemed to click. I don’t know why, either.
Burnett was difficult for newspaper guys because he wasn’t much for manufacturing quotes. He simply wasn’t the life of the party. But that never kept this writer from working with him. What you saw with Matt was what you got. He was not much for putting on a show. I really appreciated his honesty about this player or that one, even if some of those feelings were not always flattering.
This column does not contain any quotes by Matt, either. And that’s probably to his liking.
To this day, Matt still has a lot of remarkable victories that quite a number of Purple Faithful take for granted. They remember the losses to Nederland more clearly. Yet here’s a memory about Matt and PN-G that stays incredibly vivid in this writer’s forgetful mind. Burnett presided over the most unique high school football game that this writer witnessed in his entire life.
No, it had nothing to do with the glory run to the 1999 state championship game, either.
It happened in 2003 at Lamar University’s Cardinal Stadium. PN-G defeated Beaumont Ozen 14-13 on the final night of the regular season and that night absolutely has surpassed any other night in my writing career which started in 1967. I walked through the stands and down onto the field to confer with the coaches and officials in order to find out which team won the game.
Matt’s quick thinking and knowledge of the rules helped his team to capture the outright District 20-4A football championship on that night. And I know that’s true and I saw it happen with my own two eyes. Fifteen thousand spectators were standing in the November chill, wondering what happened at the end of a tremendous, but crazy game.
Matt helped to convince the officials and Ozen coach Thomas Brooks that the game clock expired before Ozen’s Angel Godina lined up for an apparent game-winning 26-yard field goal. The incident thoroughly blew Brooks away because he knew the officials planned to give his kicking team enough time to attempt a field goal.
When the official signaled for the clock to restart at 2.2 seconds, Burnett realized what happened. The game ended before Ozen started its field-goal attempt.
It’s a night that Matt can reflect upon and say that not all of his luck was completely bad.
Texas A&M has lived to see that it could do a lot worse than R.C. Slocum. Hopefully, the same will not occur on The Reservation. But Bob West and yours truly guarantee PN-G could do a lot worse than Matt Burnett.
Tom Halliburton is a Port Arthur News sports columnist.
