The nation's longest losing streak has come to an end after over a decade and 101 games

Columbia HS (Huntsville, AL) had not won a football game since 2015. However, on a magical Saturday early-season night, in Sammie Coates' second season running the program, that changed.

The Eagles beat Greensboro 41-14, ending a 101-game losing streak that had stood as the longest active skid in the country. Eleven years of Friday and Saturday nights without a win, and it took until the second week of the 2026 season for Coates and his players to put one in the books.

It started anything but ideal and clean. Columbia threw a pick-six on its first offensive snap and fell behind 14-0 early. Greensboro then started giving the ball back. The Eagles cashed in the turnovers, tied it in the second quarter, and took a 20-14 lead into the break. 

The second half belonged entirely to Columbia. Three more touchdowns, a shutout on the other side of the ball, and a final margin that did not resemble the program's recent history at all. Devin Johnson got the group going with a first-half score.

"They seen the culture change, they seen the shift and what we was trying to build, they came out," Coates said after the game. "That was huge."

Coates knows what a full roster does for a team, because he did not have one when he arrived. He took the job in January 2025 and inherited 28 players, roughly half of what a healthy high school program carries. This year the number is up to 60. The depth showed up in the fourth quarter Saturday.

Coates is a football lifer with a long resume before he ever got to Huntsville. He was a receiver on Auburn's 2013 team that played for the national championship, then went in the third round of the 2014 NFL Draft to Pittsburgh. He spent time with the Steelers, Browns, Texans, and Chiefs before leaving the league ahead of the 2020 season. From there he coached receivers at Jensen Beach (FL), worked as a Division III assistant at Ohio Northern in 2023, and coached wideouts at UVA-Wise (D-II) in 2024 before taking over at Columbia.

The rebuild has been followed the whole way. NFL Films and Gatorade have been documenting the program for a five-part series titled "All the Reasons not to Quit - The Columbia HS Story," and the streak-breaker gives that project the ending nobody could script for it.

The work is not finished. Columbia hosts East Limestone on Friday night with another chance to do something the program has not done in well over a decade: win two in a row.

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