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The classes, names and brackets may have new names and the opponent may not be as familiar, but it was still a first-round blowout for Alcoa Friday night.

Tyner may have carried a more distinguished tradition and resumé than Alcoa's typical first-round opponents of late but left knowing exactly how Chuckey Doak, Cumberland Gap and Gatlinburg-Pittman have felt the last decade.

Despite a shift up from playing the No. 3 seed to the No. 1, the sixth-seeded Rams came in without a 3A loss in the regular season but felt the thunder and lightning of the Alcoa Tornadoes just as severely as anything 4A Red Bank or 6A Ooltewah dished out to Tyner in the regular season.

“That's by far the toughest first-round opponent we've had since I've been here,” said defensive coordinator Brian Nix. “They're a great team and they played one of the toughest schedules in the state. We might have seen them in a later round if they hadn't been sent to play us first.”

While it wasn't the 68-0 humbling of the Gap a year ago or the 67-0 rout of 2006 or anywhere close to the infamous 91-7 Highland massacre of G-P in 2005, it was a 44-7 drubbing.

It was undoubtedly Alcoa displaying the playoff poise that has enabled the team from the fabled Aluminum Capital of America to stack up staggering numbers at a rate that the idled workers of ALCOA can only envy.

The numbers just become numbing — the 12th consecutive first-round win, the 26th straight playoff win, a 24th straight victory.

That Tyner Academy, without leading rusher Jermel McKenzie, just scored was a monumental achievement considering Alcoa had thrown three consecutive shutouts in the first round and now holds a 363-27 scoring edge in the first round games since Alcoa launched its pursuit of six straight titles.

That the Tornadoes moved on was expected, that they won handily over a quality opponent was almost taken for granted by the fans, if not the coaches and players. It seemed the only straying from the script of the last five seasons was a score update that CAK — Alcoa's perennial second-round opponent despite all the mechanizations and bracket wizardry the TSSAA could muster — was trailing and that McMinn Central might succeed where boards of control and seedings had failed in trying to alter the Tornadoes' second-round opponent.

So while a mercy rule enabled Alcoa to wait warmly in the locker room for word of which district foe it would face again (CAK after all), it was just another cold ride home for another first-round Alcoa victim, and this year, just one more rock in the pile.

Marcus Fitzsimmons is a sportswriter for The DailyTimes and can be reached at marcusf@thedailytimes.com