The Massillon Tigers, one of the most envied high school football teams in the nation from one of the most high school football-rabid towns in the country, had gone fifty-three years without winning a state championship when they took the field against the Hoban Knights on the brisk night of November 30, 2023, a date no one in Massillon is likely to forget. A thrilling, hard-fought defensive battle ended with the Tigers on top 7-2, and Massillonians erupted in celebration, weeping, hugging complete strangers, and flooding the downtown area for a communal commemoration.

A s the players and coaches said afterward, this was truly a victory not just for the team, but for all of Massillon, a small town frozen in time for decades even as blue-collar employers fled in droves. The one thing Massillon could, and did, cling to was high school football, an obsession ever since Paul Brown, nicknamed the ‘Miracle Man of Massillon,” catapulted the team into national prominence by compiling an 80-8-2 record over nine seasons before moving on, first to Ohio State and later to the Cleveland Browns and the Cincinnati Bengals of the National Football League.

“We’re a small town with a football problem,” says a coach from the Massillon Tigers. It’s been fifty-three years since the town of Massillon, Ohio had a State Championship to celebrate.

On November 30, 2023, head coach Nate Moore led his Tigers to win their first State Title in the playoff era. Scott Ryan, author and lifelong Tiger fan, and Becca Moore, administrator and wife of Nate Moore, interview the coaches and take readers through the adversity, the controversy, and the obsessive fanbase that is Massillon, Ohio.

Read about the battle of Tiger town versus Title town, the after-game flare up between rivals Massillon and McKinley, and what really happened when the Tiger’s quarterback was benched by the OHSAA. Massillon Against the World will have you cheering on what may just be the last small town in America that still believes that hard work is the key to overcoming adversity.

Mike Brown, legendary Massillon Coach Paul Brown’s son and majority owner of the Bengals, contributes the foreword. .