Tuesday morning quarterbacking: English makes things interesting with win

First of all, a big Thank You to the English football team for hanging on Friday and defeating Masconomet after the Chieftains rallied back from a 14-point second-half lead.The Bulldogs’ victory gives us another head-spinning, interesting week of fuzzy and/or arcane math as we strive to figure out Northeastern Conference tiebreakers.English can, of course, avoid all the funky math if it can just go up to North Andover Friday night and win. If the Bulldogs do that, the only math that’ll count for them on Thanksgiving is the final score of the Classical-English game. The Northeastern Conference/Cape Ann League Tier 1 title will be sewn up ? and it’ll be the ‘Dogs faced with the daunting task of tangling with Everett on the Tuesday after Thanksgiving.But if North Andover wins, and Masco beats the Scarlet Knights on Thanksgiving (and presuming it defeats Revere Friday), we’ll have a three-way tie. And away we go!The only way there can be a three-way tie is if all three teams are 1-1 against the other two. So that eliminates the head-to-head tiebreaker right away.According to rules that were devised last April, the next item on the tiebreaker agenda is “points allowed against teams involved in the tiebreaker.” Then comes a coin toss.Anytime one team is eliminated, the two remaining teams start back at the beginning and do it all over again.However, the NEC/CAL athletic directors are meeting Thursday, so there’s a chance this system will be tweaked some more. For example, why isn’t there a tiebreaker for won/loss records against common opponents? That would certainly seem to be an acceptable barometer for measuring these teams.The second tier became a little less muddled Saturday with Swampscott’s win over Beverly. This leaves two undefeated teams in the NEC/CAL Tier 2: the Big Blue and Marblehead. They don’t meet until Thanksgiving, and if Swampscott and the Magicians both win Friday (their opponents are Gloucester and Beverly, respectively), Thanksgiving will be very big again in these parts ? for the third time in four years.If Beverly can beat Marblehead Friday, we have the potential of another three-way if the Magicians can defeat Swampscott on Thanksgiving.And we get to do some more number crunching.Winthrop’s task is simple Friday, by the way. Beat Newburyport at Miller Field and the Vikings win Tier 3. A loss throws that whole division into a jumble too!Speaking of Swampscott, Big Blue player Richie Sullivan got laid out Saturday by a helmet-to-helmet hit by a Beverly player. After the game, Swampscott coach Steve Dembowski, speaking to some reporters (but not ours), got a little hot about it, called the hit “dirty” and opined that if it were the NFL, the fine would be $50,000.Later, he thought better, and spent most of the weekend trying to “un-say” what he’d said. That’s a little tough to do, especially since once you’re quoted, you own it.But to Dembowski’s credit, he did all he could to make people aware that his comments were in the heat of the moment. He called Beverly coach Dan Bauer and apologized and made it clear that he was speaking out of emotion, and that he in no way meant to impugn the Beverly program.Just about every school sport involves a coaching fraternity. This isn’t the NFL, where coaches duke it out on the sidelines after games. These are men (and women, depending on the sport) who face a lot of the same obstacles, and who are very capable of celebrating the good times with their opponents/colleagues and sympathizing with them in the bad times.Dembowski’s attempts to clear the air are genuine. And let’s leave it at that.It’s easy to forget that there are many Lynn kids in out-of-town private schools playing the game. We’ve made note of the Lynn/Saugus connection at Pope John in Everett.However, four former East Lynn Pop Warner players suited up for Malden Catholic Saturday against another one of their ex-compatriots, Gerald Kahari of St. John’s Prep.The MC players were Brandan Tobey, Michael DeLuca, Al