Rasheed Brown looked at Future and saw the past.
As in, the 2009 football season, when Communications Tech never had enough players for an intrasquad scrimmage and routinely struggled through practices with as few as 15.
But just because his school's situation has now improved, vastly even, don't expect Brown to express sympathy for a downtrodden opponent.
"They wear equipment, just like us," he said. "They're football players. That's what they do."
Softening ever so slightly, he added, "All they have to do is keep working hard, and they'll get better."
Brown, a 6-1, 287-pound senior, is a guard and defensive tackle, and Friday his workday was limited to 24 minutes. That was because CT, en route to a 48-0 triumph over School of the Future in a Public AA mess at 11th and Bigler, owned a 40-0 lead by halftime, meaning the the final 24 were played with the mercy rule in full effect.
Future dressed only 20 players. On the roster handed out by coach Henry Hunt, 14 more were listed as unavailable because of injury (five) or academic ineligibility (nine). Five others have flat-out disappeared.
"We're trying to clean things up," Hunt said. "It's an ongoing process. One of the kids has failing grades in an advanced-placement class. How does that happen?"
Meanwhile, how does this? CT is hardly an upper-echelon squad, yet stormed to such an easy victory, even though franchise rusher Rolando "Ro-Ro" Ransom (3,810 yards, 38 TDs), who was limping noticeably, was unavailable because of an injured right knee. (He did see action, for only two plays, at cornerback.)
Despite Ransom's absence, the Phoenix stormed to scores on its first four possessions, while mixing in two more on defense.
The fourth-quarter TD also came on defense, and two more during the course of the game (one apiece on offense/defense) were lost to penalties.
In all, the teams combined for 25 flags (worth 175 yards) and, yes, this game set football so far back, it was a miracle the players weren't ordered to switch to leather helmets.
"Going into the game without Ransom, that was a concern," Brown said. "But we also knew we had other good players, and the courage to win. I believed that because of our hard work and discipline.
"When you do your job so well that you get the this-is-easy feeling, you really like that. It should be easy, really, when you're playing a team like that. Most of their guys never leave the field. Fatigue sets in."
