By Billy Watkins
After a one year break, Lance Pogue is coaching high school football again in Mississippi.
“I really wasn’t looking to coach this season,” said the 55-year-old Pogue. “After going at it 23 years non-stop, I enjoyed my time away to take a timeout and breath a little. But it just sorta worked out.”
He is in his first week of practice at Columbia High School. The sour news for other Class 4A programs is that Pogue is far from facing a rebuilding project. Columbia won the state title in 2021, won nine games in 2022 and suffered its only loss in the state championship matchup last season. Fourteen starters return.
All of this is notable because of Pogue’s rate of success. In his 23 years as a head coach, his teams at five different schools have won 78 percent of their games.
That’s the same winning percentage as the legendary college coach Bear Bryant and 14 percent better than NFL coach Bill Belichick. Nick Saban retired from college coaching two percentage points ahead of Pogue’s mark.
Yes, it’s the high school level, but football is football and few states play it and coach it better than the folks in Mississippi.
You don’t compile a 238-67 record by accident, nor do you win five state championships and one national title by getting lucky a lot. Pogue is best known for his terrific 10-season run at South Panola when it ruled the highest classification in Mississippi. He was part of the school’s 89-game winning streak from 2003 to 2008.
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In May, Chip Bilderback resigned at Columbia and took a coaching job in Louisiana to be closer to his wife, Missy, who is head women’s basketball coach at Louisiana-Monroe.
Jason Harris, superintendent of the Columbia School District, put together a short list of candidates..
“I’ve known Coach Pogue for quite a while with his tenure at South Panola and my tenure at Tupelo,” Harris told Jackson Howell, sports editor of The Columbia-Progress. “We played every year at least once a year. I’ve always had the utmost respect for him and his teams because they were always well-coached, very physical and you knew when you played them, you’d better be ready to strap it on because you were going to get it.
“The good Lord allowed me to convince him to come out of retirement and come coach the Wildcats. We’re blessed to have him.”
Pogue said when he visited Columbia’s campus, “it reminded me of some places I had been before and was able to win at a high level. I really took that as a sign that this was where I was supposed to be.”
It particularly reminded him of South Panola.
“These are blue-collar kids with blue-collar toughness here,” he said. “I like the way they get in the weight room and work. No dead time.
“I’ve been really impressed with the staff. They’ve been part of a lot of wins here and I’ll lean on them for a lot of things. And from what I hear, Columbia is one of those towns where you padlock the place when we play on the road because the whole town goes with us. I really like that.”
The great Walter Payton played at Columbia, and there is a statue of him at one end of the field. “I love it that they do everything possible to honor him,” Pogue said.
Pogue expects “somewhere north of 60 players” to dress out for the season opener at home against D’Iberville on Aug. 30.
He’s marked another date, too: The husband and father of two expects his first grandchild to be born in October. “Cannot wait!” Pogue said.
During his year away from the grind, Pogue talked strategy with college and high school coaches. This is what he realized: “Football has forever been an evolving sport, but things seem to always cycle back around.”
He laughed. “The big thing lately has been the term RPO — Run/Pass Option. Well, I remember a time when RPO stood for Run Power Often. And we’ll do some of that. But we will be multiple in all phases of the game.
“The worst thing a coach can do is go into a new situation and make it all about him. I’ve found that some coaches outsmart themselves because they’re trying to show everybody what they know. The problem with that is, it’s not what the coach knows, it’s what the players know.”
That’s why Pogue chose to keep the offensive terminology that the Wildcats have used the past few seasons.
“It’s a lot easier for one guy — me — to learn a new terminology than 70 kids and eight or 10 coaches,” he said. “What I might call ‘John Deere’ they call ‘Toyota.’ It’s not Calculus or Chemistry. Football should be made simple so the players don’t get bogged down in terminology and they can play fast.”
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