Seckman 41, Northwest 7
Mississippi Magazine was hoping for a Northwest-Seckman scrum that helped both teams on Friday, and we got it. The scary part of Northwest’s rapid progression is that Hurricane Francene’s rain may not have been necessary to keep Cedar Hill fighting Jefferson County’s C6 kingpins all night long.
Seckman got its milestone W that the Jaguars have come so far to reach. That’s 20 straight regular-season victories for Seckman, a mark that some folks never thought they’d see from a Jags brand that was losing the “Battle of Imperial” (tell us why Imperial’s bowling alley Imperial Bowl never sponsored that thing, and named it The Imperial Bowl) a short few years ago.
SHS’s juggernaut won’t be bothered by Mehlville next weekend, bringing the Seckman Jaguars roaring with a “Lucky 21” into a more punishing 5-game stretch headed into 2024’s District postseason.
Northwest, in its own way, scored a big win too. The Northwest Lions battled bravely in the opening 12:00, giving up an amazing 0 – count them, 0 – TDs to the powerful Jags in the first frame, with Nick Baer’s clever attack only barging through after Cedar Hill took an unfortunate safety, giving Seckman an easier path to the end zone to begin the 2nd quarter. Cohenn Stark only eked-out about 3 YPC against Seckman’s mighty defense, but it’s pleasing to see that 2-1 Northwest made Brody Kube’s night for SHS a tough one, with the QB going just 5-of-10 in a steep turnaround from last week.
Northwest’s coach Scott Gerling, working with mostly juniors and sophomores, has crafted a solid defense for the ’24 Varsity Lions to build on. We’re excited to see what Cedar Hill can do in Week 4 against Webster Groves, the school that broke our hearts in Week 8 of 2023, and which opened with a barn-burner versus revitalized Vianney before settling into WGHS’s typical form.
Jefferson 35, Herculaneum 7
Did a rainy derby at Dunklin help both of its teams too? Herky made Blackcat Drive proud by resisting a Turbo Clock from Jefferson for only the second time since 2019, and – much like the Northwest Lions on Friday – fielding a defense that caused some headaches for a highly-ranked visitor when it had possession of the bean. Herculaneum held Jefferson’s running game to a modest 5.8 yards per carry, and kept the contest reasonably tight in spite of 3 painful lost fumbles. What’s more, against all odds, we think that Herculaneum’s “hot seat” coaching staff actually left the gridiron smiling like sunshine in the rain.
Why? Don’t look now, but Herculaneum coach Blane Boss may finally have that “Bell Cow” playmaker on offense that he’s complained about missing for seasons now. Herky’s senior Brayden Mattingly raced for a terrific 182 yards on just 17 carries in the crosstown clash, and that’s the kind of RB statistic that you can’t fake via “mop-up drives,” not when the Jefferson Blue Jays are trying to press their advantage and get JHS’s backups on the gridiron with a massive lead and a running clock.
Herculaneum’s date with St. Vincent almost surely relegates the Blackcats to 0-4, but that stubborn football in the rain against Jefferson’s big linemen could make The Geek change his mind about 2024’s ‘Cats. With a good defense and a classy tailback like Mattingly, HHS has a chance in a District without any favorites.
Festus 49, Windsor 14
Well, now Coach Ofodile has done it. Festus led Windsor 35-0 midway through Quarter 2, and needed only 3 more TDs to basically seal the deal on The Gridiron Geek’s “100-point wager” for 3 favored Dirty Dozen teams, with Hillsboro also building a 40-point lead over Washington. It wouldn’t have mattered if Grandview showed nothing on its long trip to Cuba, which (as we know) didn’t exactly go so hot for GHS.
But the veteran coach went Bobby Bowden-ing again, calling for so many Junior Varsity substitutes that Festus lost the Turbo Clock that it once had as of the 4th quarter. We do appreciate Coach O’s style of never wanting to score more than 50 points in a blow-out bout. It could make Lee Freeman’s developing Owls upset, not long before they’re ready to do something about it.
Hillsboro 37, Washington 7
Coach Sucharski also turned to his JV late in Week 3’s blow out, and helped TGG to lose his “wager.” It was a conspiracy. So is Hillsboro’s “1-2” record, which is now actually 1-1-1.
St. Pius 22, Knob Noster 15
Speaking of breakthroughs! St. Pius X scores a monumental comeback win over formerly 2-0 Knob Noster, a tough Class 3 outfit from the Kansas City region, in what is hopefully the first of many Varsity Lancers triumphs over its “exotic” independent slate of opponents.
The Geek has gone on the record to say that the old I-55 Conference’s schools had better not be hoping to pick up where they left off after keeping Hill Valley on “probation” a few years, because once the St. Pius padawans get a taste of this success against far-away rivals, there won’t be any going back. We watch with pity as teams like Hillsboro, Festus, and North County work so hard to escape each other’s clutches in District play, just to get one crack at an opponent like Hannibal, a state-wide contender with an unfamiliar mascot and different uniforms and everything. The Catholic school’s new football schedule lets SPX student-athletes skip straight to the fun, and get it on in those battles now.
It’s hard to believe, but Friday’s best news for “JCAA” representatives from Herky and Cedar Hill might have come from St. Pius’ big win, which proved that you shouldn’t give up on a sluggish High School offense to begin the pigskin year. St. Pius blew its third consecutive Red Zone opportunity early in Week 3’s snot-knocker with Knob Noster, allowing the Panthers to stay ahead 8-2 for a long time, and making Hill Valley’s boosters start to ask if Coach Frank Ray was trying to imitate Joe Gibbs’ second go-around with Washington, not the original high-octane version, in refashioning the Lancers’ playbook around a sleeker lineup in 2024. But the underdogs went wild for 2 TDs in less than 3:00 to take a 22-15 lead, and Ray’s increasingly solid defense took it from there.
Recaps will focus on St. Pius’ watershed as a “St. Louis vs Kansas City” winner, going into Week 4’s surreal road trip to Mississippi. We’re just as happy to see that Jack Michaud has turned into a Lancers star before our eyes in the last 3 weeks, picking-off yet another pass and taking it all the way for SPX’s coup-de-grace TD against Knob Noster. Michaud can help the defense at every position at a stocky 6’3″ – and his presence as a play-maker takes pressure off of Justin Lehn to do everything for the Varsity Lancers. All of a sudden, SPX’s 2024 schedule looks more exciting than scary.
North County 42, DeSoto 14
We’ve got a confirmed pulse in DeSoto, too, because that “42-14” final for North County was no product of trash-time in this case. DeSoto’s improved attack pierced NCHS for an early touchdown, and Coach Russ Schmidt described the contest as “toe-to-toe,” which he doesn’t say unless he means it. Week 4 is no longer a cupcake game for FHS, and Schmidt’s not coming back to Tiger Stadium just for the hugs.
Bayless 34, Crystal City 30
There went the Roulette Wheel…in the wrong direction. Crystal City vs Bayless’ winning play was a scoop-and-score TD recovered close to the end zone, and it was regretfully Crystal City’s end zone on Homecoming Night. The game turned into the kind of freewheeling “I-55” battle that Mississippi Magazine had feared, and the Hornets could not overcome the bad break from a clock operator’s error to complete a furious 2:00 comeback, after recovering a fumble of their own 95 yards away. The year’s #2 loss to Class 4 is making CCHS’s administrators rethink the strategy of booking every “misfit” Class 4 opponent they can find on the CCHS schedule, since it’s looking like a wear-down hazard to be playing 40-man rivals.
TGG thought for 36 hours about how to gain perspective on the Homecoming loss, and then it struck him. Marcus Aurelius! “Ask of a thing, what of it?” The best perspective on Crystal City’s first home loss since the 2022 playoffs is to have perspective about it, for Friday’s surprise defeat what a tremendous revival Crystal City pigskin has been having.
Just think – 5 years ago we were hoping to find one CCHS opponent, any CCHS opponent, who looked beatable to Bradley’s Farm. Now, the team’s administrators – after spending May and June saying “gosh, I hope we can play a 10-week season” – are talking in terms of “Hey, should we keep scheduling rivals 50 times our size? We usually win, but you can always fumble and lose in the rain.” The progress has been so overwhelming, it’s hard to see with naked eyes. You’ve got to step back to appreciate the Sunken Place.
The blog has more to say about our Crystal City Hornets, of course, but gosh, another would-be assassin opened fire on Donald Trump with a machine gun today, and we don’t want readers to get too wrung out from a sports column. One bright note is that CCHS and Grandview both play Large School doormats in Week 4, and it’s an opportune time for both schools to avoid a sock in the mouth.
Cuba 27, Grandview 19 (Saturday)
Oh, Lordy. We’ll get propers out of the way first. The Gridiron Geek means to fess-up to being 200% wrong about Cuba. The formerly 2-0 Varsity Eagles of Grandview High, against all accepted pigskin reason and wisdom, were in fact on a mega-hardcore “Upset Watch” for Week 3’s bout with Cuba, a team that was outscored (wait for it) 449 to 34 last season, and which needed to open up against an all-underclass team (Linn HS) and a MSHSAA doormat (Clever HS) just to grab one anxious win and one other close-call finish for the first time since 2021. Live Stream STL had called at least one leg of our “100-point wager” Week 3 trifecta right and TGG called it plum wrong, though we think the real angle working behind the Cuba-Grandview upset was so subtle that it was hidden from every analyst.
The Wildcats, known here affectionately as the Cigars, caught fire – legitimately – for the first time in forever on Saturday, winning a sloppy and increasingly hostile game in front of a crowd that had to be shell-shocked in its heart of hearts. Cuba, prior to its stunning upset of Grandview this weekend, was simply devoid of quality pigskin for a long, long time. The CHS Wildcats were like one of those prep school teams on YouTube with the record-setting losing streaks, and people coming to profile them out of pity. Grandview has been tripped by the “Missouri Military Academy” of the new QCC.
The overlooked key to Saturday night’s game was that Cuba had no idea it’s that YouTube team! They think those Go-Pro nerds skipped town back in August! Thanks to CHS’s “clever” scheduling ploy, debuting against a Junior Varsity followed by one of the worst Varsity teams on this side of the river (Clever went 0-10 in 2023, just like Cuba), the Cigars believe that they can start winning conference games now, and they don’t care who’s offended. The Cigars wore their best “Tobacco Brown” and played like unholy fanatics, with a vibe that suggested Cuba never got MSHSAA’s memos on fair play.
Saturday’s scrum reminded TGG of the Pat McManus short story “Sand Creek vs Bonners Ferry,” the comic’s Fairy Tale version of a real Varsity game that the NFL Hall-of-Fame lineman Jerry Kramer played in. The winless Bonners Ferry was playing its final time of the season (no “8-Team Districts” back then) and had been driven mad by its months of losing, growing “snouts” and “horns” and paving over one side of its football field so that Bonners Ferry’s defense could perform Body-Slams on the blacktop. Bonners Ferry clawed, scratched, and howled its way to a 21-0 lead with a ‘Teen Wolf’ style kid scoring the touchdowns, leaving cleat-marks on the chests of McManus and his undefeated Sand Creek team, until they were found hiding and quivering with fear behind the Cheerleaders. Kramer gave a frantic halftime speech, Sand Creek scored to begin the 3rd quarter, and Bonners Ferry’s paranormal power vanished, the opponents turning back into a smallish, downtrodden, last-place crew of High School kids again before Sand Creek’s very eyes. “We scored effortlessly,” McManus wrote in his one serious, down-to-Earth line of the whole tale, as Sand Creek prevailed by a final score of 48-21 or so.
Cuba was “Bonners Ferry in the first 12:00″‘ all Saturday night. There are no visiting bleachers to be found at Cuba, only a foreboding view of a fence, a drop-off, and rural Missouri’s plains across from the press box. (The Geek nicknamed Cuba “The Cigars,” but no one said they hail from Havana.) Grandview’s fans were squeezed-in by Cuba High School’s pep squad, which, without any exaggeration, taunted the Grandview Eagles loudly and at every opportunity. They even taunted Grandview’s cheering section itself, essentially chanting “Shut Up, Chumps” after one favorable referee’s call. Credit must go to Cuba’s boisterous band of boosters and parents, who never taunted the GHS Eagles one bit. They were too busy taunting their own team (!) yelling stuff at the Wildcats like “Quit cheating! You’ve got 100 yards in personal fouls! Grandview is the opposing team, not Cuba, you meatheads!” and so on.
Mississippi Magazine won’t join in the criticism that Grandview is about to take, when MSHSAA rivals see Saturday’s footage and realize how many flags Cuba drew and managed to win anyway. Many of the flags were for just chirping rude remarks at Grandview and the referees, if not trying to wring Birds of Prey rushers with a clothesline-tackle every so often. Grandview often got 15 or 20 or 30 freebie yards at a time without the 2-1 Varsity Eagles being able to finish the drives.
That was ugly, but we believe those personal-fouls taken came from the same place of total desperation that helped Cuba win as opposed to losing to Grandview. CHS was overtaken with victory fever instead of Saturday night’s old disco “fever,” to the point where Cuba’s clock operator was thumbing scales in favor of the home team. The Birds of Prey somehow converted on their final drive of the 1st half despite surrendering a time-out and all kinds of momentum, just as it happened when Crystal City’s comeback was foiled by a faulty Game Clock that forced a desperation time-out and a shouting match.
Grandview’s kid dove out of bounds at the :22 mark as Saturday’s sharp refs waved their arms “Stop the Clock” style, but Cuba’s clock continued to roll toward 0:00, and you can all guess why. Cuba’s current vibe is what Friday Night Lights bloggers like to call giddy. (GHS drew a couple of Red Zone flags to help stop the clock after that, in what we like to call “an obvious make-up call.”)
Jason Kimminau appears to have been outcoached by a staff that just lost to a dozen Turbo Clocks in a row. Grandview had its worst, most miserable effort since the Grandview-Chaffee Senior Night Accident of 2021, and it’s a worse bummer yet because GHS went on to lose Saturday’s game instead of just slipping by. The Eagles’ massive OL-DL combination couldn’t block, and made up for that by not tackling, losing the line-of-scrimmage to a Cuba line that hasn’t won the LOS versus any Grade 12 kids in 3 bloody years. When the Birds of Prey scored to claim a brief 19-13 lead, The Geek thought maybe that was Cuba’s “Bonners Ferry” moment to shrink into mice-y midgets after all, but instead, it was Grandview that looked like 6-Man Tag Team jobbers on the sequence to come. Grandview’s defense was bad and its awareness was worse, allowing Cuba’s QB to fumble, scoop, scramble and then hit a ridiculous catch-and-run, heaved right into a horde of 7 kids, that went for a pivotal TD.
Cuba went on to embarrass Grandview by switching to cautious tactics on its last TD drive, handing the ball to a student with what sounded like a Hawaii-style name like “Pacho Lau,” or maybe even Tacko like the basketball player Tacko Fall. Cuba’s PA announcer was so steady, emotionless, and robotic in contrast to the crowd that it was like an AI Voice Bot was calling each successful up-the-gut running play for the hosts, as if CHS students were up in the press box just pushing a button every time. It got so annoying that The Geek wound up muting MSHSAA TV while also shouting at it.
“Ball carrier. Twenty six. Taco Lay-O. Ball carrier. Twenty six. Taco Lay-O. Ball carrier. Twenty six. Taco L…” HEY EAGLES! They’re giving it to the Taco! He’s hiding it in his Pock-O! Get It? TACKLE THE TACO, EAGLES!!!”
TGG felt personally guilty about Grandview’s dread performance in Cuba, having posted a “42-0” shut-out prediction, and even laughing that the GHS Eagles were “33-point favorites” within earshot of some Birds of Prey who came to support Crystal City’s Homecoming on Friday. (It was a rare chance for Friday Night Lights kids and their coaches to take in a MSHSAA game-night like fans as scores rolled in from around St. Louis, not being particularly busy themselves until sundown the next day. To quote Carson Sutton all over again, that-was-just-awesome.) Some scouts from Winchester Avenue grinned along with The Geek at the notion GHS was “in trouble” and on “upset watch” Saturday. Did we all help make the Grandview kids too overconfident of going 3-0? Your reporter tossed-and-turned for 2 hours before realizing that no guilt trip was needed, and going peacefully back to sleep.
For one thing, Grandview’s grown-ups at Crystal City spoke well of Cuba’s new lineup, expressed doubt that Grandview could shut-out the Cigars, and warned their boys about Cuba’s upstart quarterback while making sure that his praises were within ear-shot, too. We were laughing over the concept that Grandview was some kind of short-order underdog against a weaker program for no reason, not realizing that the Eagles were about to have their worst game since COVID-19. Besides, local kids have read years’ worth of Mississippi Magazine’s lopsided picks on their games and other schools’ scrums, and it’s never seemed to cause anyone to take the field cocky and lose to an 0-100 brand like this.
Last but not least, The Geek and Grandview’s scouts called GHS a favorite to win in front of some skinny kids, padawans who had to be wide receivers and special-teams gunners for the Birds of Prey. That corps of athletes was outstanding for Grandview High on Saturday, nearly saving the night with long catches and runs for TDs when the visitors couldn’t hand-off and run worth a lick. If telling Varsity players that they’re 33-point favorites is bad, it was only bad for Cuba’s opposing cornerbacks that time. Maybe coach Kimminau should have gotten his bigs together and spilled the beans in pregame.
Grandview football has a big, fat problem with inconsistency. We’ve blamed it on injuries and circumstances, but Kimminau’s club was 90% healthy and still laid a massive egg on Saturday, letting the hostile environment get in a veteran lineup’s head. Last season, an injured GHS roster came back bravely at Jefferson and went toe-to-toe with St. Vincent for a while…then went out and lost to Chaffee.
In old-school Nintendo gaming terms, Grandview can swing above its head and pound Piston Honda, and then turn around and get beat by Glass Joe. This year’s Week 7 through Week 9 gauntlet of opponents Jefferson, St. Vincent, and CCHS is the “Super Macho + Soda Popinski + Mr. Sandman” challenge for Grandview, making it critical for the ’24 Birds of Prey to fix things by October.
Fox 19, Ritenour 6 (Saturday)
Fox joins our teams getting the breakthroughs they needed, holding Overland’s talented offense to nothing outside of a fluky TD to end the first 24:00, and taking the lead “St. Pius style” on a D.J. Cox interception and 75-yard runback for a touchdown.
The troubling news is that Fox’s vaunted young rusher Jude Pribish appears to have missed the game entirely, and we can’t offer any kind of an update on Fox’s new kid in the backfield either, because there’s been another “blackout” of northern Jeff County on the region’s radio coverage. 93.1 FM is STUPENDOUS for gathering about 50+ sponsorships and replacing Regional Radio’s old postgame shows, but they have also taken to reporting Jefferson County’s final scores (and giving interviews) up to about the Plattin Creek slough on Mississippi Avenue and cutting off, while also reporting on East St. Louis, as if to say, “Ha, the Meramec doesn’t count!” If anyone knows anything about Pribish’s status, please let the blog know.
Meanwhile, wasn’t that Fox’s best Suburban League win since COVID-19, and Arnold’s magic season of 2020? The Warriors did defeat Ritenour 38-0 back in 2021, but to say the Overland program hasn’t been revitalized since then would be missing the boat, on the Meramec or on Clearwater Creek. (Stay clear of it downstream from the airport.) Put simply, Fox High School didn’t just beat your Mama’s RHS Huskies.