Hillsboro 35, Fort Zumwalt West 28
Teams that score TDs and then add XPs successfully are very good friends of TGG’s Friday Night Predictions. If Hillsboro High keeps this up, picking an exact Hillsboro score will be like picking a soccer, hockey, or baseball score, though Mississippi Magazine would be remiss not to point out that Cape Girardeau “accidentally” tallied 28 exact bones after scoring points every which way.
The Geek takes the brave step of calling 50 mean student-athletes “friends,” in part to answer a charge that FHS is the only pigskin program our blog cares about. In reality, TGG is nothing less than fascinated by a Blue & White brand which has grown from a controversial and quirky bid 10 years ago into a consistent, feared powerhouse, in part by utilizing your blogger’s favorite offense in the whole wide world, the ‘Pistol’ snap and hybrid A-back/slot WRs of the Muskegon Big Red.
Plus, with HHS kicker Nick Marchetti acing all his turns, less than a full decade after Coach Lee Freeman tossed his special-teams playbook out the window, there’s no chance of getting bored just covering the Brown brothers in 2023. Hillsboro’s box scores reflect a more dynamic contender these days, and opportunities to cover fun stories from all 3 of the Hawks’ gameday units.
When you can find box scores, that is. There were a few Jeff County games with little-or-no recaps of any kind on Friday night, and Leon Hall’s contest was among them, even after Regional Radio dug into more long-term storylines, i.e. “who looks promising as a backup, coach?” in its brief presser with Hillsboro’s skipper Bill Sucharski. Given that the Varsity Hawks are 3-0 versus another brutal slate, listeners can’t have been more interested to hear about Fredericktown. Otherwise “hidden” Hillsboro games are shown on ROKU via Streamline Sports, but The Geek does not utilize ROKU, Kung Fu, Judo, or Tai Che.
Voila! Sucharski’s staff was kindly enough to upload this wonderful 9-minute “condensed game” version of Hillsboro’s Week 3 win. That cements the Hawks’ status as Mississippi Magazine’s (temporary) favorite team going into Week 4. If only more High School teams would post awesome and extensive highlights like these, The Gridiron Geek would have time to recap every team’s touchdowns!
There were only 9 views of the HUDL reel as of Saturday AM, so perhaps the Magazine can do Sucharski a favor right back by prompting fans to watch it. Hillsboro’s condensed-game reel is also full of a GAME’S NATURAL SOUNDS (Hooray!) without that familiar “TIT-TIT-TIT-TIT-TAPPATAPPATAPPATAPPA-BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ-BOOM-and-a-CHICK” dub-step drumroll that tells us we’re about to see and hear a (god-awful) Hip-Hop video instead of football plays.
Voice of ESPN Narrator: Due to time constraints, we will now move forward in our condensed Canadian Football League MSHSAA coverage of Toronto’s 97-82 victory over Hamilton Hillsboro’s 35-28 win over Fort Zumwalt West.
Readers who still know Blue & White as a good ol’ Plus-One, rootin’ tootin, Oklahoma Gator-baitin’ option offense, and not a wide-open point scoring factory (rivals tend to think of Hillsboro as a bullish power-running team that gets dressed up differently as a decoy method, but that’s a debate for summer) will be pleased to see that the Hawks’ best “trick-eration” from Week 3 came from right under center. The best HUDL highlight from Hillsboro’s 3rd straight win is rusher Payton Brown’s gallop for a score found at the 4:11 mark of the video. Hillsboro’s precise blocking looked like a delayed variety of Navy’s “Scissors” play call, complete with guards pulling to create a seam right down the tracks. Brown’s carry was a true sprinter’s touchdown in which the HHS backfield’s new linchpin used his elusive steps to accelerate rather than lose steam. With the Jefferson Blue Jays and St. Pius X Lancers tearing the I-55 Conference to shreds with “multiple” attacks based on time-honored power formations, Hillsboro is following suit with the kind of fast moving, devious offense that could keep up with Sullivan in a track meet.
Leon Hall’s only point of concern is also a point of pride. Sucharski mentioned that the Hawks were forced into an Iron Man offense and defense that grew tired with injury woes as the Jaguars mounted a late comeback. That’s a surprise to hear this early in a campaign, since it’s usually in November when fatigue strikes a Hillsboro roster that has relied too much on a small nucleus in intense practices and games played on the daily. If the 2023 Hillsboro Hawks are still conditioning, and trying to find their postseason-level stamina at this time of year (like virtually every other team on the planet), well, that sort of news could hair-lip the town mayor if we’re not careful, considering how much Hillsboro prides itself on playing with fanaticism at every turn. But if The Geek’s hunch was right that HHS will thrive in 2023’s high-scoring games, then it’s an OK idea to be playing catch-up on conditioning now, because of the mad payoff when a talented group peaks late in the autumn.
Further, it occurs to TGG that Hillsboro’s brave defense simply played itself sick over the past 2 weeks, while taking on and defeating 2 classy contenders from Class 5. After 6 quarters and yet another commanding lead for the the Hawks, tacklers who stayed healthy were too glad and spent to do anything but watch minutes tick off, with Leon Hall having proven more than ever against giants.
Jefferson 35, Herculaneum 0
The Geek wants to make Recap #2 short, so that readers aren’t fooled into thinking that all of this week’s post will be as long-winded as Hillsboro’s recap, and just begin scrolling to find their school’s final score. But who gets the shortie?
For sentimentality’s sake, it has to be Herky. The Jefferson Blue Jays, for their part, are everything that too many parents worried they wouldn’t be in ’23, with a QB so nuclear-hot that he could help James “The Constitution” Smith of St. Pius put on a show for the ages at Hill Valley this coming Friday night. But as HHS coach Blane Boss lamented on the End Zone Show, Herculaneum was suddenly struck by a dread injury-bug in Week 3 which started with the QB going down and got worse from there. When a coach busts out the old “In my (insert #) of years of coaching a football team…” you know injury problems are sudden, dire, and devastating.
Jefferson led 21-0 well into the 2nd half, making it more of a stubborn NFL-style of “0-35” for Herculaneum than a High School blow-out style “0-35”. MSHSAA, in other words, ran a Turbo Clock for the sheerest of nerdy reasons as the frames ran down. We can’t mistake 2023 for another Dunklin effort that started strong and will fade as the I-55 schedule turns tough. The wounded Blackcats are going through something more akin to what happened to 2-1 Grandview’s youngsters last year.
Lindbergh 42, Fox 14
The Geek won’t natter on about Fox’s defeat either, yet there’s no getting around Coach Tinker’s blowtorch of a post-game presser on Regional Radio. (It wasn’t very hard to hear, either.) Having blown a substantial early lead in a scrum that rolled downhill against the Warriors, Tinker went on the air and ripped Arnold’s coaching staff a new (redacted) big enough to build another Water Tower in, blistering his assistants for getting their dobbers down in the 2nd half.
It’s a curse that TGG has been in enough press boxes to recognize. Nervous mothers make nervous children, and way too many prep teams succumb to their coaches getting downtrodden right along with a trailing club. Coaches from a school that’s blown a 14-point lead prior to a “fated”-feeling 4th quarter of fails occasionally break Schmidt’s Rule #1 and become fans instead of coaches, muttering to each other like a bunch of sad boosters in a stadium lounge.
Maybe it’s Midmeadow Lane’s old HC who Tinker hopes to emulate in Week 4. You can turn the negative of an anticipated loss into a positive for a developing team by live-fire testing which coaches and players can keep their chins up. It’s hardly a coincidence that Schmidt (and A.J. Ofodile) said much the same on the radio Friday evening, even though the latter 2 skippers were in opposite straits.
North County 35, DeSoto 3
MSHSAA’s overbearing Mercy Rule strikes again, as DeSoto gets less credit than it should thanks to the perception that Week 3’s North County Raiders scored “35” unanswered points right away, got the game’s Turbo Clock rolling while a readied sophomore crew slapped helmets at halftime, and then watched as the Dragons kicked a meek field goal just for consolation points.
In reality, Coach Schmidt’s brand new team foiled NCHS on a majority of its offense’s drives all night long after surrendering 2 early TDs with blunders. That’s another small, yet critical step for the Dragons, who are used to folding-up like a sprayed spider with a big deficit.
Festus 56, Windsor 7
Midmeadow Lane’s offense hummed smooth-as-silk behind both starting QBs in the opening half. Coach Ofodile finally turned to a PK in Luke Wacker, who cured some of the special-teams ills of Weeks 1-2 while making 8 extra points in a row. We won’t accuse Emily Holt of mystically possessing the game-day bodies of FHS kickers, but it’s getting to be a pattern that Festus spends Weeks 1-2 laboring against the worst field position and the most anxious PAT efforts known to humankind, then waltzes a hot-shot kicker onto the field in Week 3.
Meanwhile, it’s official. Windsor coach Jeff Funston, as the Dada artist famously scribbled on a Mona Lisa print, is getting hot-in-the-pants…or at least hot in the seat. The Geek finally got a good look at what’s gone wrong with WHS ’23 on Friday night, and it’s a hard truth to suffer, but why not rip the band-aid off.
Windsor’s offense is the goofiest thing The Geek has scouted since Bishop DuBourg split a 5’10, 300 lb. lineman out at wide receiver against Herky in 2021. On too many plays, Windsor’s talented WR corps is standing around with its hands in its pockets, watching as QB Luke Patterson hands-off on a dive play or tries to fake and spin for a quick few yards. It’s fun to try to get a fast QB and a running back going together that way, except that WHS’s coaches are toying around with a tactic they may have problems understanding to begin with. The Albino Birds could be wondering whether the coaches even saw 2022’s improvement in wide-open offense.
WHS is running some of its option plays without a circling A-back or any potential target going to the sidelines at all, which is making the Owls’ under-center option play into a dinky sort of operation that doesn’t scare defenses with the threat of explosive gains. The crappy part is that because Windsor High’s coaches are so obsessed with trying to turn 3-yard gains into 6-yard gains between the hash marks, WHS’s offensive linemen are lined-up in low, aggressive, cut-blocking stances, unprepared to give Patterson any time at all to throw from the pocket on passing downs unless the Owls want to completely tip the plays off in advance by standing upright.
Windsor’s offense was doomed from the start of 48:00 against Austin Gould’s defensive line, since it might as well have had 0:01.5 seconds left on every possession. That’s about how long Patterson had to distribute the ball before R-6’s pursuit closed in.
The Geek has some quick-fix ideas for Windsor’s formation follies, which we’ll bring up in Week 4’s Jefferson County Power Poll. For now, it would be a good start if the HC acknowledges his team’s struggle to find an identity, maybe knocking it off with sunny platitudes to the public and (presumably) to a confused roster of seniors.
Seckman 56, Northwest 7
Nothing much to report here, except that Seckman’s easy glide through a homestand will continue at least one more week. Mehlville is 0-3 and ill prepared to challenge the Jaguars this coming Friday, though the Fox Warriors won’t be the only tough out on the fall regular-season slate. Pattonville will be the “Ladue” or the “Jackson” type of opponent lurking on SHS’s October schedule, Kirkwood already having almost fallen prey to the 2-1 PHS Pirates.
Crystal City 55, Bayless 22
Week 2 is touted by almost every football coach as a critical time of improvement. It’s hard to watch local pigskin and not think of Week 3 as equally pivotal in the growth of a team.
For instance, Bayless isn’t a competitive match for the 2-1 Crystal City Hornets these days, but somehow – perhaps due to that annual Week 3 date – the Bayless Bronchos game is playing a key role for CCHS every year now.
Crystal City has suffered just 3 minor injuries so far, but they’re annoying ones. Nolan Eisenbeis will be relegated to part-time duty on defense, if anything, until at least the Gateway Tech contest in Week 5. A couple RBs may not appear again until Week 6, though CCHS retains its Thunder & Lightning with Caden Raftery and Kanden Bolton. Coach Dan Fox wouldn’t have lamented the injuries like Blane Boss did on Friday, however, since Crystal City moved the ball like clockwork with second-string and third-string QBs taking snaps in relief of Eisenbeis against Bayless. Fox putting the 2nd-string defense in to protect a 30+ point lead wouldn’t be remarkable under normal circumstances, but with emergency QB Cale Schaumburg taking the snaps while half the backfield was being looked at by the trainers, it demonstrated Fox’s real faith that all 23 of his ’23 kids are special.
Schaumburg is a broad-shouldered rusher with a smoother, if slower gait than the starter Eisenbeis, which reminds TGG of when the unheralded college quarterback Will Worth had to fill in for injured QB Keenan Reynolds in the middle of a Navy season, and the Midshipmen immediately went out and scored 46 points against #5 ranked Houston.
It’s not uncommon for an option team to awaken when faced with a sudden change in the lineup. Play-callers must adjust to the new QB’s tempo more than many of the players have to. Eisenbeis’ speed could have been out-running his blocks for the moment, with big, strong, but very green linemen still getting the hang of Varsity. The heartening news is that Confluence Prep is once again the weakest club on the schedule, giving CCHS a timely chance to coast and lick its wounds.
St. Pius 46, Grandview 14
Finally, we come to Week 3’s advertised “main event,” which turned into a “squash” for the impressive St. Pius X Lancers instead. Simple kudos won’t do for a Tri-City visitor which stunned Winchester Avenue with its passing game early and often, beating Grandview to the edge with killer speed.
It didn’t matter that Grandview, as predicted, slowed the inside St. Pius run game to a crawl. SPX receivers were so wide-open in the early going that QB James Smith built a 13-point lead within minutes. By the third SPX possession, Smith’s WRs were literally having to pick between which open receivers were supposed to catch the ball. GHS was so bamboozled on defense that the vibe leaked over to a flat offense and special teams. Scarcely 10:00 in, St. Pius had scored more points than The Geek anticipated either side would be able to tally in the whole game!
The St. Pius Lancers are not the “1990s Herculaneum Blackcats” of the I-55 Conference. They’re the Air Force Falcons of Greater STL. Smith’s offense has taken Hillsboro’s lead in trying something that 50 years’ worth of football coaches waved-away with the backs of their hands, mixing an old, standard power-running system with all sorts of shifts, speed-option laterals, and play-action passes. Smith is the perfect quarterback for the Lancers to pull it off, with a bulldog’s determination on the run and a super-duper accurate arm.
Okay, so Jack Michaud’s “Pat Tilley” TD catch, made while falling backwards in the Grandview end zone, wasn’t a perfectly “on the dot” throw made to a receiver who was dancing through green pastures. But the fact that SPX’s inexperienced ’23 roster made clutch, highly-athletic plays, and held on to its confidence during a furious Grandview comeback bid, served to show that the Lancers are ready for prime time. Smith could prove to be Hill Valley’s finest senior QB since Mickey Karoly, who took St. Pius on a playoff run.
Meanwhile, just what in the blue hell happens to the Grandview Eagles against I-55 Conference big shots? GHS may have been prepared to win a close game by slugging it out with St. Pius between the hashes, but the otherwise well-coached Birds of Prey were toasted by the play-action downfield throw, in addition to the Lancers’ use of the shallow flat as “extended handoff” space for SPX’s fastest RBs to catch-and-run. Disappointingly, an Eagle defense that Mississippi Magazine has been carping about as the I-55’s “best play-action pass defense” since the rebooted GHS program began was hapless to defend James Smith.
Grandview’s players would be upset with The Geek if we didn’t mention GHS’s effort at a 3rd quarter comeback rally, for rally the Eagles surely did. The embarrassed home team not only scored 2 fast touchdowns to reduce SPX’s lead to 3 scores, but took 5 total trips inside the Lancer 30-yard line within the 3rd quarter alone, while St. Pius X only managed one long drive against the fired-up Eagles in the same time-frame. Grandview scored a couple of times and whiffed another few times, but it was fun to see the Week 3 hosts finally come alive, acknowledging a rowdy crowd while producing defensive stops that didn’t happen in the early frames.
TGG rejects any idea that Grandview mounted a comeback against the “Junior Varsity” of St. Pius. Mop-up TD drives in blow-out games are slow and plodding by design, and GHS was in high gear in Friday’s penultimate quarter, firing away at the end zone with its blue-collar aerial attack. SPX coach Frank Ray knows that if Grandview and St. Pius X had each been perfect on every chance to score from close range in the 3rd quarter, as Grandview had 5 and SPX almost none, that would’ve made the score something in the range of “St. Pius 39, Grandview 35” with 10+ minutes remaining on the clock. The only “Trash Time” element of that scenario is that when coaches are leading 32-0 and wind up losing the game, they’ll search around for the field’s nearest dumpster and crawl into it. You can wager that SPX had a strong lineup on the gridiron in that 3rd quarter.
But just as the 3rd quarter made the Birds of Prey look better, it made them look kind of late to the party too. Where was this urgency and concentration, the bummed-out crowd would have had to ask, in that awful opening half?
On the bright side, Jefferson at St. Pius in Week 4 is setting up to be one of the most fun, exciting, and unique small-school battles ever seen in the Tri-Cities. If the St. Louis Post Dispatch covers the scrum fairly – something the old newspaper is still quite capable of – then TGG can tell you all about Wednesday’s ledes right now. “You would think that a Wishbone team against a Triple-Option team would produce a slow, boring game, huh? But noooooo, just check out these passing-game stats from Jefferson’s Cole Williamson, and QB Joshua “Tree” Smith of the St. Pius Lancers…”
Well, yeah. The Post-Dispatch and STLToday don’t merely spell Tri-City players’ names bad, they turn St. Pius student-athletes (like “Alex Mosses”) into plants. But you can’t have everything with a place as old-fashioned as Hill Valley. If writers can watch the football fly through the air, and watch terrific receivers grab it, then they’ll report the clash of 61-67 just fine.