‘There’s nothing like this’: Why Miami Central-Northwestern is Florida’s best rivalry
Wesley Bissainthe has won two state championships and has an excellent chance at winning a third this year. He has been an all-county fixture and an All-American. He has scholarship offers from anyone who’s anyone in college football — from the Alabama Crimson Tide to the Penn State Nittany Lions — and has the makings a future NFL player, just like so many who have preceded in the annual clashes between Miami Central and Miami Northwestern.
It’s all great. His football career will go far past Friday nights and the confines of Traz Powell Stadium. They will know about him well beyond the boundaries of 95th Street and 71st Street — they already do — but in his small section of Miami, where he’s a senior at Central and seems to know just about everyone on the Bulls, little matters more than beating Northwestern. As of last week, he had never done it.
“It’s real important. I’ve got to get one before I leave, go to college,” Bissainthe said Wednesday, about 48 hours before the Rockets beat the Bulls 24-21 on a last-second field goal in Miami. “It’s my last year. I’ve got to get one.”
He’s going to play higher-profile games at the next level, certainly. Those championship rings are nice, of course, and he would like to add another one this year. No game, however, mattered quite so much as his (maybe) final shot to get a win against his neighborhood rival. Is it even bigger than a state title game?
“It most definitely is,” Bissainthe said. “It’s just the city and the community. We just do it for the community.”
Right now, there is no better rivalry in Florida than Central-Northwestern. The Rockets and Bulls are two of the most accomplished teams in the state — both have seven state championships, tied for the most among public schools. The talent level is typically nearly unparalleled — the teams have combined to send 25 players to the NFL in the last decade.
“It’s like a big-time college game, but only in high school at Dade County,” Bulls coach Max Edwards said.
The official stakes Friday were nothing more than those neighborhood bragging rights. A potential rematch could come Oct. 28 in the inaugural Greater Miami Athletic Conference Football Championship Series — if current rankings hold, they will play in the county championship for Classes 6A-3A — but it remains Florida’s best rivalry despite currently having nothing on the line more than those bragging rights.
“When you’re on the winning side of this game,” Central coach Roland Smith said, “for 365 days a year, you’ve got bragging rights.”
‘The Thrilla at the Mecca’
In South Florida, high school football attendance has dwindled in the past 15 years or so. Gone are the days when tens of thousands would flock to the Miami Orange Bowl for playoff games. The one exception is when Central faces the Bulls and 10,000-plus fill Traz Powell Stadium.
Sometime in the last 30 years, public address announcer Wilie Wilcox dubbed the stadium “The Mecca” of high school football. It’s hard to imagine any venue has hosted more future NFL players and memorable games than Traz, and no one has seen more of them than Wilcox.
He was there in 2008 when the Rockets ended Northwestern’s Miami-Dade County record 37-game winning streak on a last-minute touchdown run on fourth-and-goal and he was there in the 2018 playoffs — maybe the last time the two will ever play in the postseason — when the Bulls went nearly 90 yards in the last six minutes to beat Central on a last-minute touchdown pass.
While the teams lined up for the opening kickoff Friday and fans filled into their seats after hours of tailgating in the parking lots at Miami-Dade College, Wilcox delivered a soliloquy. It was the 46th anniversary of the “Thrilla in Manila,” he explained, and so he dubbed this one “the ‘Thrilla at the Mecca.’”
It’s an apt nickname. “The Thrilla in Manila,” the final bout between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, is regarded as one of the most brutal fights in boxing history, with Ali at one point telling his trainer it was “the closest I’ve ever been to dying.” The one thing the “Thrilla at the Mecca” will always deliver on is its own version of brutality.
“There’s nothing like this,” Wilcox said Friday. “This is a neighborhood rivalry, a family rivalry, friendship rivalry and they get up. Both teams get up for each other for this game.”
These are games defined by defense — first to 24 will typically do — and hits tiptoeing the line of legality. In the second quarter, Northwestern quarterback Taron Dickens scrambled for close to 10 seconds to extend a play, eventually dancing toward the Rockets’ sideline and finding star wide receiver Andy Jean for an 18-yard gain, as star defensive end Ky’Mani Williams decked him and knocked off his helmet. One flag flew for the hit and then another while Dickens yapped toward the bench and crowd. A Central assistant coach got ejected for unsportsmanlike conduct.
Later in the half, Rockets running back Ghana Oboh broke a 37-yard run down the right sideline, and it ended with a crunching hit collision with a Bull and a shout of “BOOM!” from either set of bleachers. “We’ll remember that one!” Wilcox yelled over the PA system. Helmets popped off at least a half a dozen times throughout Central’s win, including on the third to last play of the game when Central quarterback Dyllan Tulloch got hit hard, bounced back up and then threw a 22-yard pass to star wide receiver Lamar Seymore to get Rockets specialist Jayden John into position for a game-winning 39-yard field goal as time expired.
“That’s what this game is,” Bissainthe said.
A decade of dominance
It’s also about what they share — a home, a history and, above all else, a tradition.
In the last 10 years, the Rockets and Bulls have combined for 10 trips to the championship and nine titles. At least one has been to a state championship in every year but 2016. Central and Northwestern played in three Florida High School Athletic Association playoff games in the last decade and each time the winner went on to win the state title.
The Rockets and Bulls haven’t played in the playoffs since 2018, when a massive round of realignment knocked them into different classifications. A year later, Northwestern won Class 5A and Central won Class 6A. There was no question where the best football was being played, and the answer was more specific than just Miami.
“We all have the same upbringings,” Bissainthe said. “You’re playing old teammates, people you used to play with. It’s always going to be fun.”
