The Gridiron Geek is suffering from a case of Writer’s Block again, and it’s not hard to guess why. As has been the case with a handful of offseason stories since Mississippi Magazine became a thing (like Grandview giving up its Friday Night Lights for a minute), the best excuse for TGG to sit out June’s OTAs and July’s training camp whistle was that the offseason’s news is too damned sad to call for yet another recap. Sure, maybe 2024’s crises are less of a big deal because they’re 90% exclusive to local sports. Nobody has been banished from earning academic honors (to our knowledge), no school has a movie-protest scene going on outside because it built a 3rd student bathroom, and there’s no encore COVID-19 crisis. No one’s fired a weapon at anybody, except of course at former President Trump.
Wow, though. Our scholastic sports community just went through so many disasters in a row that The Geek doubts any reader will have not heard of at least some of it. There’s St. Pius X’s banishment from the Jefferson County Conference, the demise of our unique I-55 Football Conference (replaced by “The Quad County Conference,” a brand name so weak that it gives “UFL” a run for its money), Regional Radio and its dozens of sports reporters getting sold down the river, and our 2 best Suburban League programs – Fox and Seckman – being hit by rare floods and going homeless in 2024.
Oh, and our rivalry games are disappearing. Fast. Fox and Northwest tried to abide a redoubt of their annual series this year, but it was scheduled to happen on Arnold’s field in midseason, and now it probably can’t. If that wonderful old matchup takes place at Northwest (or somewhere) it will at least help make up for Crystal City vs Herky, Seckman vs Windsor, Herky vs St. Pius, and Jefferson vs St. Pius – that’s right, JEFFERSON VERSUS ST. PIUS – not kicking off this season. Fox and Seckman’s newly damaged fields (great timing, eh?) make the 2024 schedule as much of a headache as this offseason’s other baloney and balderdash, as does a pair of Crystal City’s opponents backing out of scheduled games this fall. Can anyone remember the autumn of 2023, when Jefferson County ruled the gridiron (alongside MSHSAA’s underrated public schools from “Quads” of other counties), and fans took all of the above for granted…just like we took most of our Dirty Dozen’s Ws?
All of this summer’s bad news is, unfortunately, real. There’s no need to make up OTHER sad tales that aren’t. That’s what drove TGG to finally start typing blog posts, and worry about the whys and the wherefores later. We can’t control the weather, and we can’t always control our High School administrators, just like you can’t keep tabs on a bunch of out-of-touch mealymouths. (The Geek repeats himself.) But we can surely control the narrative around our Varsity teams, at least when it’s summer and every school’s record is still 0-0. There’s a sob-story going around that’s 100% FAKE NEWS.
Crystal City football has been counted out, again. The 2024 season’s obituary was already printed in the paper! Coach Dan Fox, who helped lead the way as the Hornet Football program was rebuilt from scratch, has left campus to become an assistant coach for the homeless Fox Warriors. At least one projected starter in the offensive backfield, former QB and TE Cale Schaumburg, has reportedly quit football, and has transferred cross-town to try his hand – literally – pitching baseballs at Class 5 batters. At least 2 other CCHS starters, whom The Geek will not reveal the identities of, have considered giving up the team also. There are 13 valid names listed on Crystal City’s preliminary roster for 2024. Crystal’s faculty has scheduled Homecoming in Week 3, out of fear that there won’t even be a “Week 8.”
Whoa. Let’s back up a second here, gang. Mississippi Magazine already said that Crystal City pigskin would be fine in 2024 in spite of all its departures, and we still mean that, even though the former head coach has flown the nest. That doesn’t mean that the Hornets’ low August morale has no basis in fact, but it’s been brought upon by grown-ups who don’t seem to be able to look at a football team that closely and draw logical conclusions. It’s a load of cosmetics that are causing the perception that CCHS will tank this fall. The head coach leaves (as they often do when a team is about to suck), several big-name seniors graduate (as usually takes place right before a team sucks), and there’s no big crew of freshmen to replenish the Hornets’ roster like there was in 2022. If you were scouting Crystal City’s new team from some unfamiliar place across Missouri, you might go and tell the Athletic Director: “Most of their top kids just graduated. We would be able to handle them easy.”
That’s the big bummer in this particular case, because Crystal City 2024’s naysayers aren’t chirping from across the state. They’re on campus, making decisions or reporting on training camp for the Jefferson County Leader. These people are close to the Hornet football program and they ought to know better. Put simply, Crystal’s administrators are most likely VERY VERY WRONG about this fall’s team, which is capable of going 7-2, and winning more playoff games if everyone does their part. Russell Korando’s blurb on Crystal City in August 1st’s Jefferson County Leader is potentially the least-accurate thing he’s written in years, notwithstanding the prediction of a “talent drain” hitting the county and making our teams average.
Take a closer look, folks! Talk of Crystal City’s coaching change is the first faulty perception, because Coach Fox’s departure is not a typical deal where an HC quickly “gets out of dodge” when a school’s gridiron talent level is poised to fall on the rocks. It’s not Joel Critchlow leaving Windsor High in the 2000s, or the 57 coaches who fled Kirkwood about 15 years later. Yeah, last year’s CCHS seniors were its best players overall, but a Friday Night Lights team’s seniors almost always are! Replacing seniors with juniors, sophomores, and even freshmen is what Fox was arguably best at during his 5 years coaching Crystal out of the doldrums. Last year’s underclass included 3 terrific freshman “prospects” (or “projects”) on the offensive and defensive line, most notably Gage McPherson, who filled-in for suspended Seth Senter in November’s semifinal against Tipton, and made as many tackles as Luke Holdinghausen or Kanden Bolton in the Hornets’ astounding upset win. It would have been a huge story for most High School teams that its freshmen and sophomores played like veterans against the #4 team in the state, but it was par for the course for the fast-maturing CCHS boys.
In other ways, replacing Fox with former Grandview AC Adam Sims looks healthy for Crystal City. Fox’s hard-nosed style ran its course to the point where he was running out of things to say, and his attitude in recruiting a squad was frankly dangerous to have at a Class 1 school for seasons on-end. Fox, for all his ability as a Varsity head coach, was never quite willing to embrace the circumstances that his program was in and bend his will to allow as many kids onto the team as possible, even if they didn’t spend all of July and August running up and down the Sunken Place’s mammoth steps and losing 30+ pounds of fat. Class 6 schools like Arnold’s want their coaches to be willing to cut established players, roast rookies, and discourage recruits who won’t get with the program (excuse the pun), making Fox an excellent choice at Fox (the puns just won’t stop!).
By contrast, (Coach) Fox’s demand of Crystal City’s cogs to either deal with his “Army Strong” practice whip or leave the team showed that Fox would’ve preferred NOT to finish a season with 12+ healthy kids, rather than softening his style with student-athletes who were on the fence about playing ball. Prior to a 2021 season in which Fox’s footballers got VERY tired on the gridiron, Crystal’s former coach to the Jefferson County Leader, “We raised our standards and some students didn’t want to go along, so we have less players now.” Once again, that’s a solid attitude for a coach when he’s at a C6 school with 75 total football tryouts. At Crystal City, a coach can’t afford a Bear Bryant ego trip, using his training camp as a Boot Camp that wards off some teenagers who might join up and contribute. Fox’s 15-man team might have had 15 perfect training camps, but it was still about 3 or 4 injury cases away from forfeiting the season.
It’s time for a Crystal City coach to say, “We know this team needs players to survive. Play ball, and we’ll let you eat the meal with any fork you want to.” It wouldn’t make Head Coach Sims look soft to tell the Hornets that, because A) it’s the obvious truth, and B) Sims is “hard” enough to have earned praise as a Weightlifting boss at Bradley’s Farm already over the summer. Grandview High’s unique admissions are such a challenge that coaches from Grandview are used to making compromises with willing-but-unable athletes in summer, working hand-in-hand with their student-athletes to produce roster numbers instead of viewing the football team as a top-down military outfit. Crystal City has a veteran football squad in 2024 despite all of its May graduations, and they don’t need a lot of contact scrimmaging. They just need to cobble together the biggest roster they can, learn a Grandview playbook that’s similar to the one they’ve executed, and get to Week 1’s starting blocks 100% healthy. Sims represents the coach with a chance to get that done. Gone is the Sunken Place’s head coach who was so stubborn, so obstinate, that he would lose with a cardboard cut-out of QB P Cale Schaumburg under center before being convinced to put Nolan Eisenbeis back in. CCHS only needs a big-enough roster size to keep on winning indefinitely, and hiring a player’s coach like Sims is an effective way to grow that number.
Now let’s look at the team, or at least what we know of Crystal’s new lineup so far. The Geek feels remiss not to remind people that last year’s season began with frosh-sophomore kids on the DL too. Holdinghausen and his fellow senior Caden Raftery played on the defensive line in the playoffs, but that was a late-year adjustment, meaning that our underclass D-Line (plus Seth Senter) was the depth-chart that stopped Class 4 teams cold in September, and whipped rival Russellville on Homecoming. Senter’s absence in Week 12 necessitated a makeshift O-Line of Grade 9 blockers alongside Holdinghausen, sophomore Hayden Westbrook, and junior TE-LB Reed Lamar-Finch. There’s a bevy of “bigs” who can come back and put 2023’s experience to good use. Players like Lamar-Finch will be happy to move out into the open field full-time.
It’s not a leap-of-faith to say that a team will remain strong in the trenches when most of its trench fighters are coming back. If a Hillsboro or Festus club came into summer having beaten a #4 ranked playoff opponent using just one senior on the offensive line, they’d be clicking their heels over what an awesome next season there’s about to be.
Here’s a “Training Camp Paparazzi” photo of the suddenly all-grown-up sophomore lineman Elias Miller strutting his way into 2024’s first Crystal City practice, in case anyone doubts The Gridiron Geek that this year’s CCHS line could get even bigger and stronger than the last one. (We don’t know how Mr. Miller or his parents feel about candid photos or public displays of license-plate info in this era, rife with identity theft of minors and grown-ups alike, so TGG has taken precautions.)
The Crystal City Hornets may not have 11 substitutes in 2024, but their starting lineup looks buzzin’. Eisenbeis and Landon DeRousse have the experience at quarterback, and whichever one isn’t behind center should make a fantastic option as a pure rusher. DeRousse averaged 8+ yards-per-carry as a sophomore in spite of going down with an injury in 2023, and we’re all well aware of what Mr. Eisenbeis can do with the bean in hand. Then there’s Cohen Compton, who sprinted for 400 total yards on less than 50 touches in his sophomore campaign, while making 42 tackles on defense. Ricardo Pastrana is bullish and speedy, another rushing threat who’s been outstanding beyond his years on defense and special teams. As for depth in case of an injury, the fleet-footed freshman Skylar Fowler is trying out in the offensive backfield this year (we’ll just assume he was the 8th Grade’s leading rusher), and we hear whispers of a new “light-haired” transfer player lighting up camp too.
WOO! That’s a backfield, baby! Fast! Skilled! Seasoned! Tough! Deep! Versatile! How can an administrator look at those names, and predict Crystal City won’t score enough points to compete this season? If an opposing defense loses the LOS, and starts to slide backward against the Hornets, well, in that case 2024’s offensive backfield has “Turbo Clock” written all over it.
Crystal City’s corps of linebackers could be – gulp – more athletic than it was in 2023. Jacob Loveless, the “Mighty Mouse” edge rusher who transferred to St. Pius X for a year, showed up mysteriously on the CCHS Boys Basketball team last winter, just like Buddy from “Hoosiers” who “went over to Terhune” and then popped right back up on the foul line for Hickory. He’ll be 2 years bigger, faster, and stronger as a Hornet once again this season, and Loveless’ presence on the edge adds a super sack artist to an LB group made up of seniors Eisenbeis and Reed Lamar-Finch, and juniors Pastrana and Riley Hendrickson. Those players combined for a whopping 158 solo tackles last season, even with Loveless sitting out a year of football.
Such great stats belie a popular notion that the seniors Caden Raftery, Kanden Bolton, and Camden Mayes made every single tackle for Crystal City last year. Speaking of Bolton and Mayes, though, don’t worry that the Hornet defensive backfield will fall apart without its 2 most illustrious alumni. On a Class 1 “Iron Man”-style team, if you have a really good offensive backfield, you’re probably going to wind up with a decent defensive backfield too.
Compton and DeRousse are already experienced in covering visiting teams’ receivers on Bradley’s Farm, and if Varsity newcomers like Fowler are a little discombobulated at first, coaches can lean on the veteran DBs Evan Wolfe and Matthew Nelson to help bring the freshmen along. Crystal has got so many solid linebackers available that The Geek suggests Coach Sims think about putting Eisenbeis at safety this season, the way that Buddy Ryan used to utilize Seth Joyner sometimes. Nolan would make about 12,536 tackles in that role.
Losing 8 seniors before taking on a fierce schedule would be bad juju for sure. But thankfully, Crystal City appears to be the favorite in at least 5-6 of its scheduled games going into this season. That’s just another way in which the Jefferson County Leader is counting the 2024 Hornets out based on bad (or no) information.
Russell Korando argues that CCHS’s roster depth is poor because the Hornets don’t always play with 20+ athletes. It’s ironic that the number “20” has been bandied about by Crystal City boosters (and The Geek) this summer already, as the ballpark maximum number of performers that the seniors, the underclass, the frosh kids (only a couple), and incoming transfers could add up to by Week 1. But we’re only pleased to hear about 20+ potential players because Crystal City’s roster numbers were supposed to hit a low point in 2024, before close to 10 kids from a growing Middle School program are eligible to suit up next fall. There’s nothing special about the number 20 as a “magic number” of players for a Class 1 school to turn out for football.
If there’s a magic number that the smallest schools shoot for, it’s probably “22,” the exact number of Varsity players it takes to play 11-on-11 in practice. In Crystal City’s circumstance, The Geek thinks that the program’s minimum battalion of tryouts (underneath which you should probably call-off a season) is actually 16 or 17, or “16.5” if you will. 17+ players gives the average kid a starting role on 2 out of 3 units, the same workload that’s expected from a standout student-athlete on Hillsboro or North County’s football teams. If they can handle it, so can Crystal’s starting lineup. Heck, it already has.
Korando also believes Sikeston could rekindle its old Class 4 form in 2024, and wipe Crystal City off the scoreboard in Week 1. But any astute look at where SHS is as a program tells us that that’s implausible. The Sikeston Bulldogs were already rag-tag in spite of a hefty senior class last season, giving up 6 touchdowns in 15:00 to the Festus Tigers in their final scrum of the year. Now, the team’s new head coach, a “savior” candidate from Scott City’s successful program, has a long-term project on his hands that starts with rebuilding Sikeston’s depth chart from square one. Crystal City could outweigh its August opponent at more than one spot in the trenches, and that isn’t where the headaches end for a Bulldog brand that could be right where CCHS was in 2019-20, just trying to manufacture some basic execution, and not too worried about the final scores.
Louisiana, again Crystal City’s rival in Week 2 this season, is going through coaching changes as well.
Weeks 3-5 will entertain Bayless, Confluence, and Gateway, teams that this year’s Crystal City upperclass has gone 6-0 against over the last 24 months. The scratched Herky-Crystal rivalry game (GROWL!) has been replaced by a Senior Night visit from Grandview, a well-matched foe for a “cross-county” matchup instead of a cross-town bout. Even the teams who’ve already canceled on Bradley’s Farm for 2024 have served to push things in the right direction overall. Russellville has backed out of a potential Homecoming Game against CCHS, replacing the Hornets with Linn, a school that’s having its first Varsity football season this fall, like the Jefferson Blue Jays of 2011 (who lost 38-6 to a team called Transportation And Law while falling to 3 weak Illinois opponents). Mississippi Magazine won’t say RHS was maybe-kinda-sorta scared of hosting Crystal on Homecoming, and wanted an easier Week 6 foil. Really, we won’t say it. But you’re welcome to think it.
So, the Crystal City Hornets will be playing the exact type of schedule that we hoped they would this year. The slate is full of legitimate opponents, no “Linn”s and no boarding schools who’re likely to forfeit their seasons later on. But it’s also a friendly schedule for a Class 1 team, with lots of beatable foes in the mix, and not many bruisers who can pound on CCHS and cause kids to get hurt. It’s not unwise for Crystal to play as many low-end Class 4 teams as possible. It’s smart strategy. Highly-ranked C1 opponents are just as dangerous threats to win, and you don’t get bonuses for facing them.
Here’s how CCHS looks against its whole 2024 schedule, from a “favorite and underdog” point-of-view. We’ll avoid a “Las Vegas”-style season forecast out of respect to the Sunday church goers who read Mississippi Magazine. Since it’s an election year, The Geek will go with “RealClearPolitics”-style this time.
Week 1 (at Sikeston) – Leans Hornets
Week 2 (vs Louisiana) – Polls Deadlocked
Week 3 (vs Bayless) – “Red Team Wins”
Week 4 (vs Confluence) – CCHS: Reagan / Confluence: Mondale
Week 5 (at Gateway) – Leans Gateway
Week 6 (vs Roosevelt) – Leans Hornets
Week 7 (at Duchesne) – Likely Contested Election
Week 8 (at Scotland County) – Leans Hornets
Week 9 (vs Grandview) – A Toss Up (in any) State
Bradley’s Farm could lose to Gateway STEM, lose all of its “Toss-Up” states games, and still go 5-4 this season. Holy heck, that’s not a good reason to put Homecoming in July.
Do the Hornets have some problems? Oh, sure. If either of this summer’s on-the-fence players do choose to leave Hornet Football behind, the squad could be on a “Red Alert” of falling below 15 athletes because of any rash of injuries or academic issues. The offense will be under more pressure than it was last year, given CCHS’s inexperience on defense leading to more opposing big plays and razzle-dazzle TDs before the kids are seasoned enough.
The linebacking corps also needed Schaumburg’s height and reach to be a complete unit in 2024. The Hornets’ set of linebackers now looks really good, but also small, even for Class 1, with no available tacklers 6+ feet tall or 200+ pounds. Above all, we don’t want a more offense-oriented version of Crystal City to wind up in long, unwinnable contests with the score something like “45-22” in favor of its opponent in the 4th quarter. Crystal City must control the football, shorten its games, and play as few snaps as possible.
What makes The Geek optimistic is that Crystal’s ideal scenario for 2024’s games is also the way that opposing teams will want them to go. That might sound funny. Why would 9 rival teams play right into the thinly-numbered Hornets’ hands?
Well, if you were the coach of an opposing team, wouldn’t you go after that undersized group of linebackers? In “Run to Daylight,” Vince Lombardi’s entire game plan for beating the Detroit Lions was “go to work on Detroit’s linebackers,” to the point where The Pope woke up early out of bed and circled them. It would be a strong short-term strategy for Crystal City’s guests to get their biggest, baddest O-linemen running into that smallish LB corps, and wear down a speedy defense that lacks size behind the line-of-scrimmage. It could help them beat CCHS on that night alone. But if teams run the ball at the Hornets a lot, and the Hornets run it right back, that’s a good long-term outcome for Crystal City too. We don’t want long, high scoring games for a 19-man football team to play. We want that Game Clock to run. Get those starters through 9 games with 90% of them at 100%, and the Hornets can do damage in November again.
Take heart, padawans. It may seem like there’s NO chance to hold on to Jefferson County’s pigskin greatness at all, just one year after we found out about it. But remember that Crystal City is the local team that’s supposed to be flooded, homeless, and never catching a break. If the Hornets can get along this well, TGG thinks we can build Fox and Seckman (and St. Pius) new places to live in no time.