Jun 30, 2026 5 min read

John Menhart played football for Carmichaels in the 1970s and coached them in the 1990s into the 2000s.

He’s been a part of good teams, some great teams and a few not-so-good teams so has experienced both sides when it comes to lopsided games.

Menhart, the Mikes’ all-time winningest coach with a career record of 101-69-2, had his own view on how to handle those types of matchups.

“There are some teams, some programs, they win every year and don’t see it from the other coach’s perspective,” said Menhart, who was inducted into the Washington-Greene County Chapter of the Pennsylvania Sports Hall of Fame on June 7. “I’ve been on that end but I’ve been on that other side, too, so I know the feeling from either angle.”

Menhart’s 2002 team was loaded, featuring an offensive backfield of running backs Bobby Hathaway and Colby Giles, along with his son, quarterback Jono Menhart. The Mikes dominated during an undefeated regular season on their way to winning the Tri-County South Conference championship, then rolled into the WPIAL Class A semifinals with impressive wins over Bishop Canevin (42-7) and Fort Cherry (32-0) before losing to top-seeded Rochester (34-21), which defeated Duquesne in the district final, 26-13.

Carmichaels was one of the highest-scoring teams in the WPIAL, including all classifications, so Menhart had his share of blowouts to deal with.

As happens with a lot of exceptional, high-scoring teams, the coach has to decide how long to play his starters. It’s easy to say, well pull them out and don’t run up the score on an outmanned opponent but there are other factors to consider.

You want to keep your starters in good, football playing shape so you don’t want to pull them too early. But then you want to try to avoid key injuries so you don’t want to leave them in too long. And, of course, you would hope also most coaches don’t want to completely embarrass a less talented team.

Passing is another grey area. You probably don’t want to throw the ball much when you’re overwhelming your foe, but, especially if you’re a team that depends a lot on your aerial attack, you also want to keep your quarterback and wide receivers sharp and give them a set amount of plays to work with in that scenario.

It’s not quite as easy as it seems to coach a loaded, heavily favored team in a game.

Menhart dealt with those situations his own way and felt there were fewer outlandish scores when he played.

Menhart pointed out the lack of a mercy rule when he was in high school and well into his coaching tenure.

“Even so, there were no 70-point games,” he said. “If you were winning by four or five touchdowns everybody took their guys out. It was just a different era.”

Menhart did have the mercy rule, which was implemented by the WPIAL in 1998, for part of his time as Mikes coach and his 2002 squad was involved in many such games.

Menhart felt bad for his starters when the game got out of hand early on.

“That year Bobby had about 1,400 yards rushing and I think Colby had about 1,200 yards rushing and Jono had 900 yards rushing and that was mostly playing one half,” Menhart pointed out. “Those poor kids, in seven games they played a first half and that was it. But my rule was we’re playing hard till we hit the mercy rule and once we did that our kids played one more series and the starters were out.”

Jono Menhart, who went on to have a solid football career at Carnegie Mellon, was not only a great runner but could throw the ball well also and his dad would try to work in a few passing plays even in games that were beginning to get out of hand.

“There were some times I would call a pass play and he would just wave me off and give the ball to Bobby or Colby,” John Menhart said with a laugh.

Once the Mikes had fully established their dominance, Menhart would pull back on the reins.

“I’m not going to be trying to score when we’re winning by 40 points. That’s just not in my fabric,” Menhart said. “I think there’s too much of that now. I’ve heard comments where, ‘Hey, it’s not my job to stop myself, the other team has to stop me,’ but I’ve been on both sides of it. I’ve had teams that couldn’t stop anybody and I appreciated when the other coach maybe took the foot off the gas a little bit.”

One of Menhart’s objectives during a lopsided win was getting all of his players involved.

“My philosophy, and I drew criticism from my own people for it, is I spread things around. The kids all wanted their name in the paper, they all wanted to score a touchdown and we actually saw to that,” Menhart said.

“Naturally, it’s about winning the game first. But when you’re up 28-0 and you know that the game’s over, and sometimes that was in the first quarter, it’s like, who hasn’t scored yet? That might be a bad way of thinking about things but we did do that. We tried to take care of everybody.

“And actually getting the young kids in the game the whole second half really was helpful to us down the line.”

Menhart was a rare coach who saw all angles when it came to games that involved a vastly superior team and tried to do what was best for all parties involved.

It’s an admirable view from a Hall of Fame coach.

For that he should be commended and emulated.

Rob Burchianti is sports editor of the Herald-Standard and can be reached at rburchianti@heraldstandard.com.