Belleville QB Christian Dhue-Reid is nearing a state TD pass record. But at what cost?

The regular season opening game was more than a week away, but Belleville coach Jermain Crowell could see trouble on the horizon.

His team was going to be ranked the No. 1 team in the state and the coach knew how the regular season was going to play out.

“You’re going to be writing bad stuff in the paper about me,” he told a reporter, “about running the score up on people.”

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Now, on the verge of the first round of the state playoffs, Crowell’s prophecy has come to pass.

It began in Week 2, following the opener in which the Tigers struggled to beat Livonia Stevenson, 29-26. Belleville hosted Fordson in the second game and leading, 56-0, just before the half, Crowell was calling timeouts to get the ball back. When it did, quarterback Christian Dhue-Reid was launching bombs to the end zone in an attempt to score again before halftime.

The final score was 69-0 and was followed with another 69-0 rout, this time of Wayne. The next week was a 68-0 win over Glenn and then a 56-0 trouncing of Livonia Franklin.

The regular season ended last week with a 35-14 defeat of Livonia Churchill, and even in that game, leading by 21 points in the final minute, Dhue-Reid was throwing for the end zone.

That drew criticism from Fox Sports Detroit color commentator and former Inkster and Michigan star Devin Gardner, who suggested taking a knee would have been a better way to end the game instead of running plays and risking injury, which happened to a Belleville running back.

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During the preseason interview, Crowell said he was going to do everything he could to allow Dhue-Reid to break Stockbridge’s Mason Gee Montgomery’s state record of 124 career touchdown passes. Dhue-Reid now has 120.

It was assumed all of the late-game histrionics were done to get Dhue-Reid the record.

“We’re catching all this flack because they say it’s because of the record,” Crowell said this week. “It’s not about the record. Yeah, I want Christian to get the record; I think he’s going to be OK getting the record.”

Crowell said it is a change in philosophy to prepare his team for the state playoffs. The Tigers lost in the semifinals in each of the last two seasons.

“I told my coaches and my team, ‘Y’all need to learn how to finish,’“ Crowell said. “We’re going to finish. We don’t finish. We’re going to play every snap of every game and that’s going to be our mentality.

“So please, if you’re on the other side of me, understand we’re playing until the clock runs out.”

That philosophy can rub a lot of people the wrong way, especially when you don’t have a stable of Power Five recruits like Belleville has with Alabama-bound two-way tackle Damon Payne, Purdue-bound receiver Deion Burks, Penn State-bound linebacker Jamari Buddin and a host of underclassmen.

But Franklin coach Chris Kelbert said it is not Crowell’s job to try to keep the score down.

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“Late in the game it was 40-something to nothing and they threw a bomb when we had our backups in and guys that played like four snaps all year,” he said. “But I always take the philosophy that you’ve got to do your stuff and if we can’t stop you that’s our problem.”

Crowell said playing until the final down is a new approach, but even last year his teams posted victories with scores of 44-0, 55-0, 56-7 and 67-14.

In fact, Belleville appears to have been running up the score for several seasons. Scores don’t get that lopsided without help.

“In years past, anytime we got up on somebody, every backup you can name was in the game,” Crowell said, all evidence to the contrary. “We did it because I said it was the right thing to do.”

Now Crowell seems to be searching for the right thing to do to get his team to the state final.

“We’d get into games and it was like I can’t play because the other teams don’t have what we have,” he said. “But at the end of the day, we keep coming up short in the state playoffs. You say that’s not going to help you in the state playoffs. I’m like I’m not sure if it’s going to help us or not, but I do know that I don’t want to keep coaching against myself.”

This is Crowell’s sixth season at Belleville and it followed seven seasons as an assistant to Thomas Wilcher at Detroit Cass Tech.

He insists that he is misunderstood. He claims he doesn’t recruit players to Belleville, now a school of choice.

“I apologize, I’ll be honest with you, I’m a good person, I really am,” Crowell said. “I go out of my way to help people. But at some point in time, I need to say: ‘Look, this is what I feel we need to do.’ People are going to say: ‘Well, he don’t have no sportsmanship.’ If you check my record, I’ve always had sportsmanship. I kept Wilcher up off people’s heads. I’m the nice guy.”

Crowell is viewed around the league as anything but a nice guy, attempting, they believe, to embarrass other teams by going for the jugular whenever possible. Opposing administrators can’t understand the justification for continuing to run up the score.

It is like a basketball coach using a full-court press leading by 40 points. You just don’t do things like that.

“I was there, I witnessed the game,” said Churchill athletic director Marc Hage of last week’s game. “I would question the decision-making in that certain instance.”

At the heart of this might be Crowell’s initial reception into the KLAA. With one-sided outcomes week after week, suddenly Belleville was dominating its league after 12 years of never winning a state playoff game.

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Crowell claims league coaches sent film of Belleville to West Bloomfield, a potential playoff opponent for Belleville, weeks before the playoffs began.

“I was trying to kumbaya with everybody, nobody wanted to kumbaya,” Crowell said. “OK, you all don’t want to kumbaya, but now you want to tell me: ‘You’re running up the score, you’re wrong.’ I’m trying to get over the hump and win the state championship and we’re not friends no way so why am I trying to worry about your team?

“I can see I’m not on people’s Christmas list. I can live with that.”

Belleville (6-0) opens the playoffs Friday at home against Plymouth, 1-5, which hasn’t won since opening night.

Bombs away. Look out below.

Mick McCabe is a former longtime columnist for the Detroit Free Press. Contact him at mick.mccabe11@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @mickmccabe1. Save $10 on his new book, “Mick McCabe’s Golden Yearbook: 50 Great Years of Michigan’s Best High School Players, Teams & Memories,” by ordering right now at McCabe.PictorialBook.com.