The Mississippi Conference is the new hotbed of Tri-State pigskin. Festus and Hillsboro have combined to win 52 games and make a pair of Show-Me Bowl appearances over three consecutive seasons. The success of 2020’s Festus team and 2021-22’s Hillsboro teams serves to show that the feats were not flashes-in-the-pan, but a breakthrough, if not a “watershed” for two traditional winners who are not in need any such thing.
The Geek scoffs at people with stupid slogans like “100th place is better than 2nd place,” and last year’s Mississippi slate showed why. Windsor and DeSoto and North County kept losing to Festus and Hillsboro, but it was nice to see that North County could still make both top teams sweat, and nicer to see the Windsor Owls and the DeSoto Dragons nearly take down the Bonne Terre Buccaneers in the regular season and the playoffs respectively. As Hillsboro head coach Bill Sucharski said on Live Stream STL this preseason, there’s been a fine line between the “state” teams and rival teams.
The site’s Big Ideas for the 2025 campaign include placing editors from TGG’s pro content team on the Jefferson County beat, playing “detective” to help Mississippi Magazine avoid the boo-boos, blunders, and baffling statements that continued to plague the blog during Festus’ run to a runner-up C4 finish in 2024. Even should another catastrophe like last year’s flagship site crash befall Mississippi Magazine this autumn (we pray not), we’ll be ready with fact-checking that goes beyond what live game announcers have to say. As MSHSAA can attest, the accuracy of their info can be found lacking.
In fairness, last year’s Festus Tigers seemed to catch the media by surprise. With the exception of the wonderful Hal Neisler, our local Friday Night Lights commentators reacted not by looking deeply into a roster that we knew was dangerous all along, but by reporting on the Tigers like a football team from Mars that was full of Martians who they’d never heard of and couldn’t get straight. The Geek, often watching two streams at a time without his glasses on, got tricked into reporting backup CBs catching balls in the postseason, touting injured Parker Perry healthy thru Week 13, and all sorts of other messes. There’s a new prestige to Class 4 games in JeffCo. The media’s job is to make Hillsboro and Festus kids into household names – the *right* names.
One reason the local media – and MSHSAA’s loud-barking contingent of “forum” users – treat Festus R-6 pigskin like Ghandi (“first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win”) is that Festus does not send many people into the sports media after graduating or having coached there, like North County and other familiar schools tend to do. They have no clue who’s a WR or a CB or a KR at Festus because Festus was never a team they cared about. It’s a blessing and a curse that everyone knows the FHS boys now. They’ll be a target for opposing teams, not an interloper.
No detective can solve the 2025 Festus Tigers’ riddle before Week 1, not even Columbo or Saul Goodman. Will the Black & Gold maintain the form that’s not only taken FHS to a state final, but which came within a hair’s breadth of winning back-to-back District championships, and eventually stared-down the #1 team from the #1 biggest class for one glorious half-and-change at Midmeadow Lane last Senior Night? Or is it time for a state-championship contention “hangover” such as we’ve seen Park Hills Central go through in 2024, and the Jefferson Blue Jays and Fox Warriors suffer before that?
Coach O and The Geek either have vastly different opinions, or this preseason is another case of the Jefferson County Leader’s Festus Tigers preview misleading due to its time and space restrictions. HC A.J. Ofodile implied to the JCL that Festus High will be fantastic with the football again, but perhaps floundering to rebuild on defense such as was the case three years ago. “A lot of (last year’s) defensive players were three-year starters,” Ofodile tells Russell Korando. “There’s a steep learning curve, especially against programs that I think are on the rise.” But the CEO is clearly thrilled about the offense he’s got coming back with Perry at quarterback, Jackson Frank at wide receiver, and a host of O-linemen who are starters already.
Notions that Festus could combine last year’s potent offense with a defense as poor as its worst days from 2021-22 are amusing. Perry’s wins and losses in his first year at the helm would all tend to come in OT after “52-52” ties in regulation if that scenario occurred. Heck, it wouldn’t be a thing after Week 5, because at that point, Midmeadow Lane’s offense would have its defense kidnapped, and play both ways to replace them. But what The Geek has had in mind to forecast for this year’s Black & Gold is something else, a “Hillsboro-2024” tightrope of terrific starting performers without a safety net underneath.
Perry is already a nice Large School quarterback at only age 16. Festus has two amazing RBs in Kamden Yates and Leuantae Williams. Carson Grass is about to become a dominant force on the line, and Antonio Pinkston could be found smashing glass on both sides of the LOS this year. The defensive backfield’s depth is poised to make up for the loss of pure speed with Trey Lacey’s class graduating. Special teams should keep looking good. The challenging schedule makes a 6-3 season into an accomplishment, so that the Tigers’ only real “hangover” would be a sad-sack campaign.
The problem is that you need more than 22 above-average players, especially against the Class 5 and Class 6 big shots who remain on the Tigers’ schedule, not to mention a crosstown rival as deeply stocked as the Hillsboro Hawks. The Gridiron Geek’s worst fears about the FHS second-string this season were realized when the backup defensive line replaced the starting defensive line in the middle of Jamboree Friday. The contrast was not a sight for sore eyes. Festus took the field at its home Jamboree looking not altogether unlike the state-level contender it’s been for two autumns straight. When the backups came in to block and tackle, the lineup looked more like the Sikeston Bulldogs from 2023. Size, quickness, and poise vanished from sight.
The 2025 Festus Tigers will look perfectly steady on their feet – not “hung over” at all – until if-and-when a rash of injuries occurs. If it does, especially on the front lines, the OOC schedule of Rolla-Francis Howell Central-DeSmet-Farmington-Jackson will beat FHS down to prevent a league or District run.
Hillsboro’s JCL preview (not online?) was exceptionally well done, except The Geek doesn’t see Hillsboro “replacing” its superstars anymore. That’s the good part of Bill Sucharski’s dynamic, hard-driving coaching staff having taken over for Windsor’s current coach Lee Freeman in Hawkville. Sucharski has been criticized for pushing Hillsboro too hard late in summer, when Freeman used to let his Hillsboro teams defeat Affton 28-14 and trust that the Flex would conquer all after the leaves turned. (It often did.) If the Hillsboro Hawks were still religious about playing bang-and-crash option football with a quarterback under center, then Preston (and Payton) Brown would be “replaced” by other kids running the same plays from the same formations. Hillsboro’s no longer plugging kids into a scheme, but scoring TDs any way it can. QB Braxton Chazelle has already scored plenty at the helm.
It’s probably not Festus that could have a season of scoring derailed by bad defense. It’s Hillsboro. That’s what happened to the Hawks late last season, when Brown’s absence due to injury surprisingly hurt Hillsboro’s defense more than it hurt the offense. It isn’t so much that Hillsboro was missing its linchpin after Week 6 of last season, but that the Hawks were missing the kind of team-effort defense that Leon Hall has become known for. The graduations of 2022 and 2023 didn’t do much to hurt HHS’s tackling in the overall. By 2024, they had grown dependent on one do-it-all safety.
Build up the pass rush, Hawks! That makes any defensive backfield look better whether or not “Brown” is on any of their jerseys. There’s a Romaine in the front-7 (Coleton in this case), and we’re still looking forward to what LB Jackson Marks can do as an upperclassman. Landon Lambert’s return from an injury doesn’t make losing DL Griffin Morris to a more-recent injury any less harsh to deal with, but it’s a “trade off” for 2025’s defense in practicality. There’s a “Marchetti” kicking the pigskin for Hillsboro too, something that could help give the ailing HHS defense better field position going forward.
Hillsboro will never schedule Country Day again after the ridiculous snafu of last August. (To recap: Country Day had a great first half, Hillsboro had a great third quarter, and then MICDS walked away with the score nearly tied during a lightning suspension, saying “we won.”) Sucharski has replaced the Country Days Rams with the Moberly Spartans, a quality Class 3 outfit that labors against a tough schedule of Large School teams (much like Hermann from Class 2), for each team’s debut date this Friday. Moberly lost to Hannibal, a Class 4 team on Hillsboro’s level, by 38 points last midseason.
You wish that Windsor and DeSoto could “trade” some players going into the 2025 season. The Mississippi’s underdogs look talented but incomplete. Windsor’s coaching staff is enthused about its offensive line, which made strides between Week 1 and Week 9 of last year, even though Evan “Klingon” Wessels has graduated. But the running back Willie Coleman III, who dominated Windsor’s stat sheet with 1000+ yards and 10 touchdowns in 2024, is not among the Varsity Owls listed on MSHSAA’s official lineups for this fall. DeSoto, meanwhile, appears locked and loaded with a $1,000,000 field renovation, RB Eli Thebeau poised for a magnificent senior year, and QB Cannon Kisner (what a name for a quarterback) taking the starting role. DeSoto’s problem is similar to the Festus Tigers’ problem – knock a couple of outstanding linemen out with injuries, and it’s Katie-bar-the-door.
The Geek was alarmed that Collin Barton, a 225-lb. guard going into his junior campaign, might be the most impressive lineman on the Dragons’ offense this season. Like a college coach in the “Transfer Portal” era, HC Russ Schmidt of DeSoto has welcomed OL John Schmidt from the burly Grandview Eagles to reinforce a line that should also be bolstered by Barton’s younger brother Caleb, already a huge blocker at 6’0 and 270 lbs. in 9th Grade.
It’s easier to work around a lack of sheer size on defense than offense. That’s why the St. Pius Lancers had such an effective “Mighty Mouse” defense in 2024, and why The Geek doesn’t think Festus will imitate Hillsboro from last November with a splendid offense and an overwhelmed defense. DeSoto’s defense made massive strides last autumn, allowing 35 touchdowns after surrendering about 50 total TDs in the 2023 campaign. We expect more development from DeSoto’s ‘D in the course of another manageable schedule, in which TGG has DeSoto favored in four of the first six weeks.
Speaking of schedules, we won’t blame Windsor for putting an “Elevator Team” slate on the ledger as of this year, since last season’s see-saw syndrome was more about the Owls’ inconsistency than having a ragged slate of opponents. DeSoto takes praise for getting its “Weird Summer Matchup” exactly right compared to the misadventures of other schools, given Schmidt’s well-matched series against the big-but-beatable Freeburg Midgets. It’s a more gainful scenario than playing a very weak or a very strong team from far off the beaten path, and more noble than Perryville playing IL’s total patsies.
If Coleman’s not in the Windsor backfield, that’s a mighty blow to the Owls in the short term. But it might not be a bad thing for the growth at WHS if there is no single feature running back on the squad this season. Windsor is trying to build a deceptive Flexbone attack in which rival defenses have so many speedy kids running all around them, they lose track of their game plan. Coleman’s ability would threaten to outpace all Windsor rushers to the point where WHS coaches would be tempted to set the option-play aside and just give it to their top weapon again and again, like St. Charles West’s counterfeit versions of the Wing-T formation. At least this way, Windsor can proceed with the ensemble cast that it wants to build anyway.
Don’t misunderstand The Gridiron Geek when he talks about how critical and important this year’s Mississippi Conference race will be. In the past, focus on conference games was kind of a consolation more than anything else, a group of parents and boosters who could see that none of the league’s five teams were going anywhere special in the colder months, and said things like “Well, let’s just see if we can win our conference games.” This season, Highway A’s nearly unmatched local track record (are DeSmet and Lutheran North close together on the same road?) makes the Mississippi into a prestigious race by itself. What’s more, there will be five teams of all different styles who could conceivably win the trophy by playing well against powerhouse rivals, not by getting hot in a season of local teams’ malaise. None of our MRAC teams look anything like each other on Fridays. Regardless, they’ve all got a chance to finish first in what could be the league’s most entertaining regular-season race of a generation.
The Mississippi Conference is no longer a consolation prize. It’s a springboard to greater things. Hillsboro and Festus’ success means that MSHSAA won’t dare to load up another “West Plains” contender in Class 4, District 1. Whoever wins the conference is likely to win the District, and that team competes with District 2-thru-4 state quarterfinal foes who have emerged from some weak District playoff fields, at least compared to District 1’s.
Lutheran North will take a giant step backward this season. Warrenton won’t be there in Week 14 again. Kearney has spent the peak of another talent cycle, and Cape Girardeau Central is in Class 5. (So is Farmington.) We’re not telling our Class 4 padawans to focus on their conference race because a conference title is the best any of them can do. We’re saying whoever wins the Mississippi crown will be set for more state glory, if they can grab it.
MSHSAA’s eventual Class 4 state bracket might look nothing – ZIP, ZERO, and ZILCH – like it has looked when this year’s matchups are made. West Plains rarely makes a run at state in consecutive seasons in a row. Parkway North should continue to be a menace, though it won’t be a shock if PNHS is sent up to Class 5 when the state association crashes its website releases Class and District Assignments tomorrow. Gateway STEM, the reigning Cinderella champion of District 2, might just fall off a cliff completely after failing to capitalize with an on-campus buzz for an 11-game streak last campaign. Webb City doesn’t lord over the Class 4 bracket anymore. If MICDS and Cardinal Ritter stay promoted, the landscape is open.
To get to the Elite Eight, this year’s District 1 (and Mississippi) champion will probably have to go through the dangerous Union-Pacific cartel, facing a Meremac team rather than a Charter school from St. Louis in Week 13. That can only mean one thing – it’s time to get this train on the tracks.