Marc Cisco's legacy honored by Region coaches during Friday's games

Rip Fly 45.

>It sounds like the name of a rapper, but it’s actually a football play that helped Marc Cisco win 241 games during 47 seasons as the head coach at Jefferson.

>It was no secret that Cisco’s Bears were going to run that play over and over.

>Stopping it was the problem.

class="related-link">More: Jefferson High School football coach Marc Cisco dies at the age of 90

>Following Cisco’s death at the age of 90 a few days earlier, many Monroe County Region teams played tribute to the legendary coach by opening their games by calling their version of Rip Fly 45 on Friday, Sept. 25.

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>“We have a guy on our stuff, Nate Mills, who played at Jefferson,” Monroe coach Kyle Reed said. “We actually put it in earlier this season, but we just call it ‘Cisco right’ or ‘Cisco left.’”

>Monroe got minimal yardage on the play to open the game, but ran it almost exclusively on a successful drive later.

>“We drove all the way to the 6, then jumped offside and that stopped us,” Reed said.

>Gibraltar Carlson coach Jason Gendron, a former Jefferson player and coach under Cisco, says the coach had Rip Fly 45 on his license plate.

>“When I took over here, we had to have that in there,” Gendron said. “It’s more than a formation or a play. It’s an identity. When you run that and embrace it, it permeates through the program.”

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>Gendron broke down the terminology like way:

>“It’s formational, Rip and Liz,” he said. “Rip was right and Liz was left. Fly is the wingback coming in slow motion across the line of scrimmage – 45 and 46 were the power series Marc liked to run.

>“If you know it, you know it. It’s iconic and legendary. … There was nothing better for Marc than to roll his fingers and say, ‘Run it again, Run it again.’”

>Carlson did run it for its first play Friday of a 48-22 victory over Taylor.

>“Absolutely,” Gendron said. “It was the right thing to do. We were able to hit it for about three yards, but later we ran it for an entire drive to end the game.”

>Ironically, Ida did not open with Cisco’s signature play even though Blue Streak coach Jeff Potter played for him at Jefferson.

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>“It was not something we’ve repped enough to be completely comfortable with, but we did run it later in the game,” Potter said.

>Cisco would have been proud of his former player. Ida won a battle of unbeatens against Adrian Madison 41-20 without attempting a pass.

>“Marc meant lot to a lot of people,” Potter said. “For me, he was like a second father. That whole Jefferson coaching staff was.”

>Potter’s father Dave Potter assisted Cisco for 40 years. The elder Potter was one of seven coaches who spent more than two decades on the staff.

>“You just don’t get that anymore,” Jeff Potter said. “My naïve self thought that all that staffs just stay together like that, one big family. A lot of it had to do with Marc.”

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>Jefferson’s current head coach Rob Beaudrie runs a spread offense, but called Rip Fly 45 as the opening play of a 28-26 victory over Flat Rock at Marc L. Cisco Field.

>That came following an emotional tribute given by public address announcer and former Jefferson player Iggy Bijarro before a pre-game moment of silence for Cisco.

>“We ran four or five plays straight of that,” Beaudrie said.

>A penalty eventually killed that drive and forced the Bears to go back to their normal offense, but it was the call for the game-winning two-point conversion with just over a minute remaining.

>“We used Rip Fly 45 to win the game,” Beaudrie said. “It’s a hard play to stop. That’s an honor to Marc.”

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>Airport coach Derek Anderson played against Cisco while a star running back for the Jets.

>“He was a great man, awesome and completely terrifying for a high school kid,” he said with a laugh. “I remember Coach Cisco mean-eyeing me from the sidelines. Then, after the game he would shake your hand and say, ‘Good game. We’re going to get you next time.’”

>Bedford coach Dave Mifsud, who like Cisco is a member of the Michigan High School Coaches Hall of Fame, marveled that a coach could last nearly 50 years at one school.

>“That’s pretty impressive,” he said. “They had a really good thing established there.”

>Whiteford’s Todd Thieken remembers briefly meeting Cisco years ago.

>“I coached with Al Romano at Tecumseh and Marc and Al knew each other really well,” he said. “He would never have remembered this, but his wife (Donna) used to film the games and I had a really nice conversation with the two of them when Tecumseh played Jefferson one year.”

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>New Boston Huron coach Tom Hoover had many memorable battles against Cisco’s Jefferson teams during his more than 20 years at Allen Park.

>“We were friends for over 40 years,” Hoover said. “When I was at Allen Park, we always wanted to play Jefferson or, if that didn’t work out, we always wanted to scrimmage them because it made you better. They were a tough team.”

>And tough to beat, thanks in large part to Rip Fly 45.

>“They got so good at one thing that it didn’t matter what you did,” Hoover said. “If they got you down, they were just going to batter you. A friend of mine said it was like an old threshing machine. They just keep churning and burning.”

>This article originally appeared on The Monroe News: Marc Cisco's legacy honored by Region coaches during Friday's games