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Winning the District 27-4A football championship came with a bonus for the 1974 Carroll Tigers, one of the best CCISD teams of the 1970s.
The Tigers not only earned a playoff berth that year, they made history as the first Carroll team to win a football district title since the school opened in 1957.
Only league champions qualified for the postseason in those days, when Carroll and the other CCISD schools competed in the UIL’s largest classification.
Fifty years after cementing their legacy, the ’74 Tigers remain a close-knit group.
“It’s like a brotherhood,” said Richard Guerra, a senior linebacker and captain that season. “We’ve kept up with each other. The sad thing is that there was a lot of prejudice going on then, but we never saw it on the team.
“I get emotional just talking about the guys I played with. We were all real tight. When we were in junior high, we were all rivals. But by the time we were seniors, our goal was to take it all, to win district.”
Bobby Mandel, left to right, Richard Guerra and Mark Reeves played key roles on the 1974 Carroll football team that made history 50 years ago.
Carroll finished 9-2 in 1974, winning nine straight games after losing to La Marque in its season opener. The Tigers bounced back from their only regular-season defeat with a 53-7 rout of Gregory-Portland, avenging a 34-0 shellacking the previous year, and went 8-0 in 27-4A play.
But the season ended abruptly with a 39-28 loss to a 7-3 McAllen team in the first round of the playoffs on a windy night at Buccaneer Stadium. Carroll was bedeviled by six turnovers – five fumbles and one interception – and the Bulldogs capitalized on four of them for touchdowns.
“The best team didn’t win that night,” said former King head coach Joey Allen, whose Mustangs lost to Carroll 28-14 that season. “But that…
Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/carroll-1974-football-team-made-101441793.html
Author : Corpus Christi Caller-Times
Publish date : 2024-12-30 10:14:00
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