This is the THIRD installment of the 2012 Enterprise-Journal All-Area football team. Thursday’s edition will unveil the 2012 Player of the Year.
TYLERTOWN — Like any high school athlete, Tyre’oune Holmes needs to be fed. He just happens to like unusual snacks.
Flashback to mid September, when Tylertown was in the middle of a normal, run-of-the-mill practice.
Holmes, Tylertown’s starting quarterback, strapped up his helmet and crouched in a defensive stance in front of a group of wide receivers.
One by one, Holmes swatted away the passes as his teammates ran slant routes.
What happened next was hardly far from the norm, either. Holmes began galloping around the practice field as he pounded his chest and cried out “Feed the beast! Feed the beast!”
It was a friendly reminder to everyone that there wasn’t much the quarterback couldn’t do. And it was Holmes’ loose-yet-edgy style of play that helped him dominate the area for the second consecutive year.
“I was just doing like they say — feed the best, feed me,” Holmes said. “If you want good things to happen, put the ball in my hands.”
Tylertown put the ball in his hands, and he didn’t disappoint.
Holmes, a Mississippi State commit, racked up 1,260 rushing yards and 20 touchdowns from his quarterback spot in 2012, setting two Tylertown school records in the process. He totaled more than 3,000 rushing yards in his career and 51 touchdowns, the most by any quarterback in school history.
That was the tip of the iceberg for Holmes and his accolades. The senior made the All-State team as an athlete, was the two-time Region 7-4A Player of the Year and played in the Mississippi-Alabama All-Star game last Saturday in Montgomery, Ala.
So what does the Beast, also known as “T-Man” in Tylertown’s, eat on the field?
“Yards and touchdowns. That’s what I need to eat,” Holmes said sarcastically. “That’s the only way I get full.”
In a sense, he was being truthful. No team really had an answer for Holmes, with the exception of Bassfield, which was Tylertown’s only regular-season loss.
Holmes scored a touchdown in every game but one and had six games of 125-plus rushing yards.
His numbers were slightly down from his breakout junior year, when he ran for 1,381 yards and 21 touchdowns on 166 carries and was named the Enterprise-Journal Player of the Year.
Holmes placed huge expectations on himself for his senior season and hardly disappointed despite 59 less carries. Even with fewer carries, Holmes still churned out an unheard of 10.7 yards per carry average.
“It sounds like if he’s averaging 10-something yards a carry, I should have gave it to him a little bit more,” joked Tylertown coach Jason Johnson.
Johnson would have loved to run Holmes 20 to 30 times, but Holmes’ doesn’t exactly have the body for that type of beating. At 5-foot-10, 170 pounds, Holmes’ 10 carries a game fit just right into Johnson’s Wing-T offense.
Given Holmes’ competitive fire, he thought 2,000 yards would have been an easy feat with an even more increased workload.
Even so, Holmes understood there were plenty of capable mouths to feed.
“You can’t be selfish on the field, especially with the amount of players I’m surrounded by,” he said. “… As long as we’re winning, I don’t care if I get one carry or none.”
The Chiefs’ supporting cast, like fullback Phillip Slocum and running back Chris Jones, helped Holmes in the long run. Slocum ran for 953 yards and 16 touchdowns, and Jones finished with 640 yards and seven TDs after battling an ankle injury for nearly a month.
“We had some other guys that were such impact players. … They took a lot of pressure off T-Man. They opened the big plays up for him,” Johnson said. “Had we not had the production out of those other guys pounding it off tackle, Tyre’oune doesn’t have the year he has without that.”
Holmes snacked on big plays the entire season. Every few weeks, Holmes was good for a “typical T-Man game,” as Johnson liked to call it. Those games involved limited carries and a large quantity of yards.
In the season opener, Holmes carried it eight times for 170 yards and two TDs (21.75 yards per carry). Then against Vicksburg, he had five carries for 159 yards and three TDs (31.8 YPC). Against Lawrence County, he raced for 127 yards and two TDs on six carries (21.17 YPC) and then exploded for 176 yards and a touchdown on just six carries (29.33 YPC), including an 85-yard touchdown jaunt.
“There’s really no big way to explain it, I’m just a big-play player,” Holmes said. “I like to make big plays — 50-60 yard runs and touchdown throws. It just comes natural. It’s bound to happen, no matter what game we’re in.”
Not to be forgotten is Holmes’ passing skills. After all, he’s still a quarterback. Holmes rarely threw, but was accurate when called upon. When Tylertown lulled defenses to sleep, Johnson dialed up pass plays that regularly went for 40 yards or more. Holmes finished 41 of 75 for 719 yards and seven touchdowns.
“He’s got God-blessed talent, there’s no doubt about that,” Johnson said. “If you’re fast, you’re fast. You can’t manufacture that. We’re going to miss him greatly in the program, that’s for sure.”
Holmes is going to miss it, too. Although he leaves Tylertown without a state title, he played a prominent role in three consecutive district championships.
Now, he’ll bring his sub 4.4 40-yard dash and beast-like appetite to Starkville.
