Fox 49, Poplar Bluff 14
Woo hoo! Fox deserves this week’s top recap after what might be a breakout performance, dealing a Turbo Clock defeat to a Poplar Bluff team that waffled Hillsboro 30-21 one week ago. Leader Publications’ excellent live blog captured how D.J. Cox went crazy in Quarter 1, scoring on two long jaunts to set the tone for his 200+ yard evening. Ryan Joggerst became Arnold’s next hero with an “Isaac Walker Meets Class 5” rumble of 20 yards through thick-and-thin (mostly thin) blocking to give Fox a marvelous 21-0 edge. Poplar Bluff made a brief rally in the third quarter, but the Warriors made a goal-line stand to preserve a 35-14 lead before scoring to seal the deal. Robbie Twitchell had an interception return for a TD to get the Turbo ticker rolling. What a fantastic effort from the Fox Warriors less than three weeks after Mississippi Magazine wrote them off!
We’re going to have to eat our words about Fox head coach Brent Tinker. Heck, we already are. But the haters of Mississippi Magsazine’s rankings (which did, in fact, readjust the rehabilitated Fox Warriors back up to #5 in Week 8) can have their fun later on. Right now, we’ve got one hell of a #1 versus #4 semifinal in District 1 to worry about. Farmington and Fox present as sharp of a contrast of styles as you’re ever going to see, which is funny because one year ago, Farmington versus Fox would have been a contest of two teams running the same plays at each other. As it stands, the *new* Farmington Black Knights are a breathless no-huddle passing team, and a successful one, in 2025. It’s a fascinating pairing for Week 11 because not only are the Warriors and Black Knights old-time rivals, but Farmington has as tough of a “3-7” visitor as you can imagine.
Herculaneum 36, John Burroughs 21
“Woo hoo” Part 2. Herky perseveres through Keaton Reeves’ injury saga that was sagely reported by Russell Korando in the Jefferson County Leader this week, rushing for more than 300 yards to defeat pesky John Burroughs. Herculaneum and Valle University will play in a Class 3, District 2 semifinal next week that could be considered the “real” District Championship Game, free of Lift For Life’s “United Football League” squad poised to spoil the fun for everybody by Week 12. The only thing The Geek can’t tell readers at this early hour on Saturday morning is whether Deets came back to play in Week 10 or whether Herky’s backup QB Chase Luebbert took over the show, since STLToday’s subscribers-only recap of Herky vs John Burroughs eludes TGG’s brand new laptop, and there are only so many PPV games a man can buy (and folllow) while dishing out Snickers bars.
Hillsboro 35, Sikeston 21
Kudos to HHS Junior High coach Jonathon Stotler for live-texting The Geek on last night’s exciting C4D1 Q-Final in Hillsboro. Sikeston looked to fulfill the promise of a rebuild under its second-year skipper once the Bulldogs managed to tie Hillsboro 14-14 at the halftime break. Just like in 2019’s Mississippi Conference championship scrum against DeSoto, the Hawks turned to a freshman as an improbable security blanket. The 15-year-old Jaydn Rice became QB Braxton Chazelle’s weapon more and more often as the playoff game went forward, until Hillsboro was able to break a 21-21 deadlock with a Chazelle run in the fourth quarter. Following that up, Auston and Preston Ross came through with dueling pick-six interceptions to seal the deal, although only Auston’s counted due to a penalty flag on Preston’s INT. Look, everyone knows that when Hillsboro has a pair of siblings racing up the hashes together, it’s bad news for opposing teams. The fact that one of the Hawks’ new pair of brash brothers is named Preston must have rival schools shaking in their boots!
Leon Hall’s defense has flashed the kind of ability that could cause problems for Festus High School this postseason. The question going into next Friday’s district semifinal game is whether a “flash” can be enough. The Hawks will need to show they can break blocks and tackle more consistently for a full 48:00, since it’s the only way the #4 seed can beat #1.
St. Pius 64, East Prairie 0
The St. Pius Lancers cruised as expected in the first round, taking a prohibitive 43-0 halftime lead over #7 seed East Prairie. Hill Valley’s underclass again shined in garbage time, adding another “21-0” half to the mantle after accomplishing the same thing against Cuba earlier this year. The St. Pius X administration can attest that The Geek predicted “Cody Shaver, 241 yards” before learning that Shaver rushed for 211 yards to go with three TDs in the quarterfinal. They must have called back one 30-yard Shaver carry on a penalty.
Shaver had a seat in the third quarter after crossing the 2000-yard threshold for St. Pius in 2025. He’s now the top single-season rusher in SPX history, and it’s not over yet.
St. Pius-versus-St. Vincent in the C2D1 semifinals will fit right into an extraordinary local schedule in Week 11. The two old I-55 Conference foes will clash while JeffCo faculties cheer for Perryville’s team (*growl*) as Festus folks stand firmly behind the Lancers against the dangerous, dashing Injuns of St. Vinny’s. But that’s just where the rivalry juice begins on November 7. Great heavens, we’ll have Seckman vs Northwest, Festus vs Hillsboro, Farmington vs Fox, Valle vs Herculaneum, and St. Pius vs St. Vincent on one evening between 7 and 10 PM! TGG will do his darnedest to make sure St. Pius X’s semifinal tilt doesn’t get lost in the mix. It could turn into the best game out of the five.
New Madrid County Central 46, Jefferson 22 (Thursday)
“The record for resigning by sweeping the pieces off the board and breaking it over an opponent’s head belongs to Baron Von Varplesteen, whose 11 times in one 1946 tournament has never been matched.” – Irving Chernov, “Half-True Chess Facts” from Chernov’s Coffee House CompanionÂ
It feels crazy to say this, but the NMCC-Jefferson playoff game felt more “lopsided” late on Thursday evening, after the JHS Blue Jays finally got in double-digits on the scoreboard. Yes, the first half was such a catastrophe for 2025’s eliminated Blue Jays that the second half became a mere formality. The weird thing about New Madrid’s mad effort in the first half is that Jefferson’s low morale led Blue Jay Way to ask for its own butt-kicking. Jefferson was burned on so many high-risk plays, and made so many risky decisions, it was as if HC Matt Atley’s school was taking the pregame pep-talk standard “Ante Up!” to a whole new level, choosing to resign by kicking the table over. Jefferson tried to convert every fourth down, even a 4th-and-11, early in the game. An ailing Cooper Frisk did what he could to rescue the Blue Jays, but had to be spelled by sophomore Sam Kerley after nine weeks’ worth of wear-and-tear in midst of a downturn. It was Kerley who tossed Jefferson High’s only meaningful touchdown pass of the quarterfinal to Noah Buehler in the second quarter. Before that, the ‘Jays compiled at least six first-half turnovers if you count fourth-down misses (plus New Madrid’s successful onside kick), heartbreakingly coming within a yard of converting on Jefferson’s first two drives in plus-territory, to tee up NMCC to claim a four-score halftime edge like it was Lutheran North on a December day. Jefferson didn’t look slow or small or outgunned by a Class 2 middle seed. The troubling theme is that the Blue Jays blew a gasket anyway, missing out on Week 11 for the first time since 2022.
As of the Hillsboro-Sikeston game’s third quarter, Friday threatened to be the first time Jefferson and Hillsboro missed the District Semifinals together since JHS was a start-up program. In each team’s case, a physical, no-nonsense football brand has morphed into a finesse team in a few years’ time, not always with fine results. But while Hillsboro steadied the ship and played a hard-nosed scrum to win last night’s C4D1 quarterfinal over Sikeston, the Blue Jays have backslid from the buzz of an OT contest against Park Hills Central to the impossible fate of losing five in a row. Frisk’s offense maintained a decent run-pass balance to the end, but greasy-fingered defense put the unit under way too much pressure.
We can’t let this October go without celebrating Frisk’s career as Jefferson’s quarterback. Frisk emerged as a sophomore in 2023 and wowed R-7 instantly, passing and running for multiple TDs in his fledgling year. After taking the helm as starter in 2024, the 5’9″ speedster manufactured over 50 combined touchdowns, 4000+ combined yards, and top-half rankings in our site’s Power Poll as Frisk’s Class 2 team ran out to a 5-2 start in ’24. Kerley surely can’t fill Cooper’s shoes, but he can be a weapon to build around for 2026.
Is Atley’s coaching chair the new “Hot Seat” watch at Mississippi Magazine, now that Blane Boss and Brent Tinker have pulled their B’s out of the fire with resilent years and playoff Ws at Herculaneum and Fox respectively? Jefferson’s program has gotten caught up in the “Howe Crossing” frills of life while losing its soul at the Glassworkers Club. JHS’ winning teams have always been built around muscle, discipline, and grit. As the Blue Jays’ star power increased, its power in the trenches disappeared, giving Atley the rotten choice of becoming R-7’s “Back to Basics” huckster for the summer of 2026, or sticking with Jefferson’s fancy new tactics and wondering if 2026’s seniors will be able to execute them.
If the Blue Jays’ sports CEO Alex Rouggly decides to shake up the coaching staff for next season, he could be torn between his heart and a changing landscape. Contenders like Farmington, Festus, and Hillsboro have demonstrated over the last few years (Farmington especially in 2025) that if you open up the playbook, you can pique the players’ interest and begin getting better performances out of your fast kids and linemen alike. For the Blue Jays, going back to a dedicated power-running scheme would run the risk that we saw Fox nearly succumb to, of the kids deciding that they’ve heard and seen it all already and that the grit-your-teeth-and-block-harder method is never going to get their offense into paydirt often enough. Sticking with Atley’s wide-open tactics runs a risk of making Jefferson an ordinary STL Metro team, with three exciting athletes to go with lousy blocking and tackling. But the Blue Jays aren’t in exactly the same straits as the Farmington Black Knights, having already rewritten the playbook before this year’s dire downturn materialized. Jefferson’s kids might respond to a new head coach whose message is “Let’s win 49-42!” by saying, “Yeah, uhh, we’ve tried that. Can we get back to winning 28-7?” Rouggly’s conundrum is to decide whether the JHS offense should return to its roots, and if so, decide if Atley is the man to install a pure Flex, Veer, or Double-Wing and prevail with it.
Perryville 39, Windsor 14
Are the Windsor Owls becoming a broken record? *rrrrttt* Are the Windsor Owls becoming a broken record? *rrrttt* Are the Windsor Owl ….
It’s starting to become absurd. Windsor loses to Perryville 39-14 in the first playoff round of 2025 after losing to Perryville 26-8 in the first playoff round of 2024. Cast aside a 48-19 loss to Union in 2023, and the Owls went through the same Groundhog Day syndrome in consecutive first-round losses to Gateway STEM in 2021 and 2022. It’s a repeating doom-loop that Imperial’s smaller of two schools can’t work its way out of, despite the thunder-claps of real quality that always seem to come too early in the schedule to help the Owls advance past Week 10, just like Jack Kuda’s successful runs against Perryville went to no avail when Windsor couldn’t run, pass, or pitch out to move the sticks on third down.
Head coach Lee Freeman’s first chosen schedule will be key in getting Windsor up to the waterline in Class 4. Windsor’s early-season slate seems designed to help WHS show off everything it’s good at on the gridiron. It’s time to book opponents who can expose Windsor’s issues early-on, so the Owls can work on them, and play better when the leaves fall.
North County 21, DeSoto 6
TGG can go over the heartbreaking details all that you wish. DeSoto pooch-punting on its first turn trying to keep the ball out of North County linchpin Noah Lashley’s hands, only for Lashley to scoop it up like a shortstop and run it out to midfield before looming large on NCHS’s ensuing touchdown drive. The Dragons advancing to the Raiders’ 15-yard line in response, only to stagnate on three straight snaps to turn the bean over on downs. DeSoto doing almost exactly the same thing on its first possession of the second half, going nowhere on a 4th-down-and-3 attempt at the opposing 25. North County’s 14-0 lead to begin Quarter 4 was nearly cut in half when DeSoto QB Cannon Kisner hit Brenton Drummond on a clever block-and-release route for a 19-yard TD pass. But the Dragons’ XP attempt was blocked, and the Raiders soon scored to salt the game away.
Coach Russ Schmidt’s seeding gamble did not pay off, a thread that will also give the DeSoto-NCHS postgame a touch of melodrama. Maybe the Festus Tigers will romp to such a lopsided District 1 championship that no team will regret not making it to Midmeadow Lane in Week 12. Then again, maybe they won’t. We willl see if Schmidt takes any flack for not choosing to go up against the Sikeston Bulldogs, to at least have gotten a shot to upset Festus on November 7. Sikeston, it must be said, didn’t look all that lousy last night either.
The real story with DeSoto is less “Hollywood.” The ’25 Dragons were always going to be thin in the trenches, a flaw that the Raiders exposed in Week 10. North County won the line-of-scrimmage and DeSoto lost it, up, down, sideways and as plain as day. Lashley had all kinds of daylight that Eli Thebeau’s scrappy offensive backfield didn’t have, making it unfair to go back and woulda-coulda-shoulda a playoff meeting that DeSoto was lucky to hang around in under the circumstances. DeSoto’s new program is wonderful but the Dragons have to develop more muscle up the middle, or the whole thing will be apt to collapse again after the next time DeSoto defeats Hillsboro in a regular season. The scuttlebutt is that DeSoto’s sophomore class of 2026 is “insanely talented.” That’s great to hear. We hope some of them are “talented” at being 250+ pounds, however. Rehabilitating a Class 4 brand without a solid line is like serving eggs without hot sauce in California. DeSoto needs more pure bruisers to arrive by next August.