High school football teams spend months of hard work chasing the dream of a berth in the playoffs and possibly a state championship. But sometimes teams can’t control their fate and the dream rests in the flip of a coin.
That was the case for
Amarillo,
Lubbock and
Caprock (Amarillo), three Texas Conference 5A schools whose coaches met at a gas station over the weekend to flip a coin in order to see which teams would advance to the postseason. The three teams tied at 2-4 in 5A District 1.
The coin flip between Amarillo’s Chad Dunnam, Lubbock’s Juan Rodriguez and Caprock’s Rowdy Freeman was caught on film by several cameras and has been distributed on various social media platforms.
Amarillo, 2-8 on the season, won the coin toss and keeps its season alive with a playoff berth against
El Dorado (El Paso), which is 9-1. Lubbock and Caprock, both 3-7, saw their season come to a close.
The coin flip has been a ubiquitous way to solve tie-breaking dilemmas in sports. Every high school football game starts with a coin flip and it has long been the method for solving ties in determining home-field advantage for playoff teams with similar seeds.
The origin of the coin flip is believed to go back to Roman times when the process was called "heads or ships" since one side of the coin had a Roman emperor’s head and the other side had a picture of a ship.
Professional sports have their own history of famous coin flips. In March of 1969, the NBA held a coin flip between the Milwaukee Bucks and the Phoenix Suns, the two teams with the most losses that season. Phoenix lost the coin flip and chose Neal Walk with the No. 2 pick. The Bucks got Lew Alcindor (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar). Two years later, the Bucks won the NBA championship.
In 1970, the Pittsburgh Steelers flipped a coin with the Chicago Bears for the No. 1 overall pick in the NFL Draft. Chicago lost the pick and eventually traded the No. 2 pick to Green Bay, which picked a defensive tackle named Mike McCoy.
The Steelers picked Louisiana Tech quarterback Terry Bradshaw. Pittsburgh went on to win four Super Bowls during the 1970s with Bradshaw earning Super Bowl MVP honors twice.
Then there is the case of the Los Angeles Lakers and the Chicago Bulls in 1979. The Bulls lost the flip for the No. 1 pick in the 1979 NBA Draft and selected David Greenwood of UCLA with the No. 2 pick. The Lakers got Magic Johnson, who led Los Angeles to the NBA championship as a rookie in 1980 and five total during his career.
The most famous coin flip in high school history belongs to
Midland,
Midland Legacy (then known as Midland Lee) and
Permian (Odessa). The three teams finished 5-1 in district play in 1988 but only two teams advanced to the 5A playoffs. In a three-way coin flip, Midland Lee and Odessa Permian both flipped heads and Midland flipped tails, thus eliminating Midland from playoff contention.
H.G. "Buzz" Bissinger immortalized the coin flip in his book "Friday Night Lights". The scene is also shown in the movie of the same name, although
Cooper (Abilene) replaces Midland as the loser of the coin flip via poetic license.
The premise behind the coin flip is that there is a winner and a loser, but the result is determined by chance. But in at least one instance, the flip of a coin produced two winners.
In the 1948 City League playoffs between
Lindblom (Chicago) and Fenger (Chicago), the two teams tied 13-13 in their semifinal game. There was no sudden death or overtime periods back then but there were tie-breaking procedures in place for playoff games that didn't involve a coin flip or extra playing time.
Texas used the method of yard-line penetrations, which involved counting the number of times a team drove within a pre-determined yard-line throughout the game. Other tie-breaking methods include counting the number of first downs each team compiled.
The Chicago City League had a different approach. Instead of a tie-breaking procedure, the officials in charge simply flipped a coin, with one caveat. The winner of the coin flip advanced to the City League championship game but the loser of the coin flip received a share of whatever laurels the coin-flip winner achieved.
In this case, Lindblom won the flip and advanced to play
Austin (Chicago), the 1947 City League champion. Although Austin had won 26 straight games, Lindblom emerged as the 13-0 winner for the City League co-championship. Due to the coin flip, Fenger also received a share of the title.
The following week, Lindblom played
Fenwick (Oak Park) for the All-Chicago championship. Fenwick was the Catholic League champion and was led by future Notre Dame quarterback and Heisman Trophy winner Johnny Lattner.
Again Lindblom, and Fenger, came out winners with Fenwick falling 13-7 in front of 65,000 fans in attendance. So even though Fenger technically lost its last game of the season due to a coin flip, it actually gave Fenger a share of the city championship.
