Hillsboro 69, Windsor 12
The Geek owes Windsor and HC Jeff Funston an apology for predicting that WHS’s option offense would be hapless against the Hillsboro Hawks. Signal-caller Luke Patterson and the Varsity Owls pierced Leon Hall’s starting-11 defense with a touchdown drive in the early-going, and fought hard against a Turbo Clock.
In fact, the “69-12” final from Hillsboro is an example of how The Geek actually whiffed on a bunch of Week 6 predictions, Friday Night Lights games in which the final score “accidentally” turned out to be close to what Mississippi Magazine called for. In other words, the blog was lucky. Hillsboro led Windsor 21-6 when the Hawks went berserk on special teams, scoring on 3 long return TDs to salt the contest away. We never criticized Windsor’s special-teams coaching effort this season, and Week 7 would be a shady time to start doing so. It makes sense that if Imperial’s kids finally learned how to play offense and defense against Hillsboro, the next growing-pains episode for WHS is for the backups to allow kick-return TDs.
Multiple scrums from Week 6 turned out to help BOTH county teams in some way, and Hillsboro vs Windsor was one of them. HHS was reminded that if Windsor and DeSoto continue to take baby-steps toward respectability, the days of “Who won the Hillsboro-versus-Festus game, and was either team upset by North County?” Mississippi Conference sweepstakes may end soon. Yet the ’23 Blue & White also scored 69 points against a far better coached and prepared lineup than the DeSoto Dragons which allowed 79 points to Hillsboro’s supposedly “more talented” Varsity Hawks last year. That’s another confidence boost tacked-on to many confidence boosts for HHS this fall. We only wish that there was Saturday stat-sheet on which TGG could check to see if Payton Brown had another night, after scoring 24 points against Festus. Sadly, the region’s High School pigskin reporting has taken a Wile E. Coyote dive off a cliff this midseason, as we’ll touch on again shortly.
Poplar Bluff 24, Fox 19
Head coach Brent Tinker has had enough of Fox’s 5-game losing streak, and he may have had enough of Regional Radio hosts taking surprise vacations. When a bloke from the KJFF weather department was handed the HOOOME POOOLS N’ SPAAAS! Home Pools & Spas End-Zone Show and began an interview with Tinker about Fox’s heartbreaking Poplar Bluff loss on Friday, the pair had this exchange:
“Coach, how did your kids deal with the hot temperature today?”
“That’s a boring question.”
It wasn’t just a boring question, it was a bizarre question. The weather on Friday night was fantastic! But if Tinker’s real concern is the “heat” on his coaching seat after losing for a month-plus, there probably won’t be so much of it. Not if Fox’s administrators can see beyond Ws and Ls and credit the team’s form instead.
Arnold has gotten better each and every weekend against a Murderer’s Row of opponents that no school would ever want to face in succession. The Warriors were spanked by Lafayette’s classy passing game in Week 2, but fared better on defense against Lindbergh the next week, while putting a good scare into the Flyers in Quarter 1. Fox went on to score twice as many times against the frightening Ritenour Huskies, and hung around versus mighty Seckman.
Added to all of that, last night’s brave comeback bid against Poplar Bluff is icing on the cake in determining that Fox football is healthy and improving. Tinker’s team could be rated as the most dangerous 1-5 group in Missouri’s Class 5 postseason bracket. You wouldn’t want to be the high seed facing the Warriors in Round 1.
Festus 42, North County 14
The Festus defense might have had its best game of 2023 on Friday night, and coach A.J. Ofodile must be pleased with a no-huddle offense that finally got out of its own way enough to score 6 times and produce an impressive blow-out victory over North County on the Bonne Terre Buccaneers’ Homecoming Week. (Hate to say it, but NCHS’s halftime deficit probably made the Great NCHS Traffic Jam worse, as folks ran away from a football game like it was trying to hurt them.)
To talk about Black & Gold as a team would cloud the real story of Week 6, though. Festus senior RB Hayden Bates is turning into a MONSTER before our very eyes. Midmeadow Lane’s late-bloomer of a tailback was dominant all by himself against North County’s defense, with the Tigers often appearing to hand-off to Bates and then kind of stand still, just to watch and appreciate #10’s carries. Bates broke a deadlocked game wide-open in the 2nd quarter by crushing a strong safety’s tackle attempt in the deep flat, then scampering another 60 yards or so for a TD. The rumble is time-stamped for Mississippi Magazine readers on the YT below:
So Ofodile’s got himself a tough defense, a boosted kicking game, 2 excellent QBs, and at least one, if not more elite running backs for each of them to hand off to. That’s everything you’d want to see in a District championship bid – except, of course, for that offense that penalizes itself into 1st-Down-and-30 so often.
But in The Geek’s experience, no coaches’ message is the best remedy for an error-prone huddle (or Sugar Huddle in R-6’s case). Success is the remedy. As the Tigers begin to be more disciplined with the bean in possession, they’ll start to recognize that Festus ’23 is too fast, too dynamic, and too well coached to need “adrenaline rush” right before the snap in order to beat defenses to the punch. Why manufacture your own problem by getting too excited? It happens to teams when they don’t really believe that they can win by relaxing, playing their game, and avoiding flags. A couple more Ws like Friday night’s, and FHS will believe it.
Crystal City 42, Russellville 8
Once again, a single player’s performance looks to overshadow his whole team’s sunny storyline. The Geek was wrong about Russellville mounting successful drives in the early going, but correct about the CCHS Hornets turning a corner in midseason. Crystal’s retooled offensive line sawed through a group of seniors who took part in Russellville’s 8-win season of 2022, blowing a Grandview-sized front-7 off the ball as well as Jefferson, St. Pius, or St. Vincent could have. The lights are coming on for CCHS’s young upstarts in the trenches, who once again prevented an opposing team with much more to offer than Bayless or Chaffee from scoring any meaningful points. Crystal City did not lose any fumbles for the second contest in a row, seldom took a pre-snap penalty, suffered from almost no busted plays at all following a freak 2-yard loss on the opening snap, and led the Russellville Indians 36-0 merely a few moments into the 3rd quarter of Homecoming.
But the Crystal City Hornets are QB Nolan Eisenbeis’ team now, and Friday of Week 6 was Eisenbeis’ night through-and-through. #12 had his best outing ever as a rusher (and a game-manager) against Gateway in Week 5. At the Homecoming Game, the junior was so brilliant as to make last week’s win look like a warmup.
Where to begin? Let’s begin where #12 began, scrambling around right end for a long gain on Crystal City’s first TD drive, then minutes later, improvising a play to freeze Russellville’s defensive backs before hitting Camden Mayes for a 20-yard completion. Eisenbeis, shooting the bean around like a QB who didn’t essentially break his finger against Louisiana, rifled his next 6 pass attempts in a row for completions in front of a shocked and delighted Sunken Place throng.
For a grand finale, the starting QB hit Mayes again in the corner of the end zone to produce a 28-0 lead, on a fabulous throw-and-catch that reminded TGG of Tim Tebow’s go-ahead touchdown bomb against Pittsburgh in the AFC playoffs.
Timestamped:
Running and passing are not all that #12 contributed in his greatest night yet as a Hornet. Eisenbeis is sharing an even bigger load of the LB duties with Coach Fox putting Caden Raftery and Luke Holdinghausen, 2 of his most athletic contributors on offense, at the defensive-end spots in an effective gambit that’s comparable to Russ Schmidt playing Jaden Reddick and Elijah Cummings as edge-rushers in 2014. But what’s most amazing about Eisenbeis’ Iron Man performances is that 2023’s linchpin is leading a dynamic, deadly offense, instead of the paint-by-numbers playbooks of Class 1, District 2 opponents from central Missouri.
Crystal’s coaches are daring to let Kanden Bolton and Cohen Compton run way out into the flat on option plays, while ordering #12 to continue to run over right and left tackle and “rub away” from defenders in trademark CCHS style. It’s a strange mix of tactics that would never work, except that Eisenbeis has a CANNON of an arm when it comes to throwing laterals. The QB is wrist-ing long laterals into the open space with as much velocity and accuracy as any Flanker-Screen passes, giving Bolton and Compton the ball all alone in green pastures. Bolton is already great with the egg in hand – give him 10 extra yards of daylight and he’s cash money.
Coach Fox is coy with The Geek when asked about Crystal’s nifty fanned-out option plays that produced many roars at the Homecoming Game. The skipper emailed Mississippi Magazine to say that CCHS’s “I-Formation” was the factor behind Eisenbeis’ deft disposals (Gosh, #12 would rock in an Australian Rules Football game, wouldn’t he?!) and other new wrinkles in the Hornet attack. But that’s just a smokescreen to throw TGG off the trail and to prevent any opposing coaches from effectively scouting the ’23 Hornets on Mississippi Magazine. The Nebraska Cornhuskers used to play Crystal City’s kind of style in an I-Formation, and the QB and the pitch-man stayed at regular distances from one another on running plays to the outside. Not even Tommy Frazier’s teams had a knack for zipping the ball out to a Lonely End such as Crystal City has gotten good at. The Geek’s seen 20+ Army-Navy Games and found nothing to top those Eisenbeis laterals. CCHS has itself yet another deadly “option”…and a special weapon.
Week 7 is a good time to catch the year’s best momentum. Pending the status of the Herculaneum depth chart in Week 9, the Varsity High School Hornets could be just one more tough victory away from sealing a #1 seed and all-time home field advantage in the District playoffs. The only bummer is that Van-Far has a hard challenge trying to stream its Varsity pigskin to a neighboring Solar System, so the Bradley’s Farm kids might embark on a starship trek with no live news. Regional Radio can’t be counted on to tell us much after flat ignoring CCHS in Week 6.
Given how important Crystal City’s outer-space bus voyage to Van-Far has turned out to be, it would be torture to have to wait for a tell-all final score at 10 PM. We’ll look closely into how CCHS fans without a personal “Han Solo” spacecraft handy can get real-time updates from the Week 7 scrum, and relay our tips very soon.
St. Pius 55, Cuba 6
It’s a case-in-point for NFL fans watching Friday Night Lights for the first time. On just about Any Given Friday, the St. Pius Lancers could defeat the Cuba Wildcats by 50 points. Add a bunch of other Given Fridays, and even some Taken Fridays, and the Lancers would do it again, 10 or 20 times in a row. Heck, the SPX Lancer underclass could probably do it on 10 Given Mondays or 10 Given Thursdays consecutively, unless the Cigars quit puffing whatever’s gotten a proud program into dire trouble. In Any Given Summer, a struggling little team can shut down permanently, which means we’re all Cuba Wildcats fans for the time being.
Grandview 21, Herculaneum 18
Did the Grandview-Herky game have another outcome that helped both teams? Herculaneum is happy to have gotten on the scoreboard for 18 points after a frustrating point-less streak, while GHS grabbed 3 interceptions to give the defensive backfield some much-needed success and confidence.
However, it’s still an underachievement for the Birds of Prey to have scored 21 points against an I-55 defense as banged and bruised as HHS’s Blackcats. The Geek has felt as though Jefferson and Grandview are destined to play a really good, really tight bout in some year ever since 2018, but this coming Friday, Mississippi Magazine just hopes that the Eagles can stay in the contest.
Seckman 48, Parkway South 7
The Geek is running out of things to say on Week 6’s lopsided games (and lopsided games in general) except that a few of the Dirty Dozen’s biggest wins weren’t automatic blow-outs at all. An opposing out-of-county crew of North County, Russellville, and Parkway South doesn’t necessarily result in 3 of 3 blow-outs for favored teams. There weren’t many cupcakes in the kitchen on Friday, but our Jefferson County teams got to work and cooked up some tasty pastings.
Oakville 48, Northwest 7
Week 7’s guest Parkway Central has lost bigly to every reputable Class 5 team on its schedule, giving Northwest 2 fine chances in a row (combined with Webster Groves on a neutral field in Week 8) to break the worst kind of Streak.
Jefferson 28, Perryville 26 (Saturday)
Regional Radio did wake up in time to cover an awesome Homecoming Game out of Perryville on Saturday…but The Geek did not. We’ll peek at the 6-0 Jefferson Blue Jays’ most dramatic win of 2023 in the Jefferson County Power Poll.
Fredericktown 27, DeSoto 25
…and meanwhile, what’s a good excuse not to go over this one?