Sometimes it just doesn't pay to be leaps and bounds better than your opponent. Take the Smith Center (Kan.) High School football team, for example. Tuesday night, Smith Center scored 72 points in a Class 2-1A playoff game against Plainville. And then the first quarter ended.

At first glance, the self-righteous will decry: "How dare they run up the score and embarrass those poor kids from Plainville like that. They should be ashamed of themselves."

But really, there wasn't a whole lot head coach Roger Barta and his boys could do. Plainville was bad. Really, really, really bad.

The Smith Center defense forced six turnovers and returned one for a touchdown. Meanwhile, the offense ran the ball on 14 of its first 15 plays…and scored eight times. Six different players danced their way to the end zone.

The carnage was so nasty that Barta instructed his team to attempt two-point conversions after it scored, thinking that there was no way his team would convert each time.

Alas, it did. Nine times.

Barta pulled his first team offense midway through the first quarter and yanked the first team defense at halftime. During the second quarter, he instructed his players to fall down if any of them reached the opposing team's five-yard line.

By that point, Smith Center already had broken the national high school record for points scored in the first quarter, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations. Prescott (Ariz.) High School previously held the record for its 66-point performance in 1925.

While the inclination to denounce Barta and his boys for what clearly was a Grade A butt-whuppin' is understandable, it also is hasty and unwarranted. The coach had to put someone on the field, and those someones had to do something once they got there.

Had Barta kept his first stringers in the game until late in the second half, that would have been deplorable. But the man was doing everything in his power—outside of pulling random students out of the stands, slapping some shoulder pads on them and tossing them out there to run a base 4-3 defense—to keep the score as low as possible.

It could have been worse. The score could have been 288-0, which was on pace to happen after the first quarter.

Sometimes, blame simply does not need to enter the equation. It wasn't Smith Center's fault they scored at will, even when they were trying not to. And you can't really fault Plainville. It's difficult—not to mention just plain cruel—to point the finger at the kid that got beat up by the big boys and ask why he didn't fight back harder.

You can't even blame the referees. After Smith Center got up by 40 points, the zebras enforced a state rule which allowed the game clock to continue running, even after incomplete passes or plays that ended out of bounds.

Barta has since stated he did not try to run up the score, and his coaching decisions throughout the game back that up. Heck, the Plainville head coach even said he didn't think Smith Center had tried to run up the score.

Both coaches understand that sometimes these things just happen in sports. There are times when one team will try to embarrass another, but this was not one of them. Any negative backlash Barta and his team are receiving is baseless, not to mention foolish.

Smith Center prevailed 83-0 in the end. And still Barta found himself in a no-win situation.