The 2020 season featured as many talented, strong-willed local gridiron squads as Jefferson County had seen in a long time. That year’s Fox Warriors nearly took down the #1 ranked team in Missouri, while the Festus Tigers and Jefferson Blue Jays matched Arnold’s playoff conquest with District championships in C4 and C2. Hillsboro played like a true contender again following the doldrums of 2018 and 2019, while Seckman and Grandview began to make genuine MSHSAA noise for the maiden time in modern memory. Even the Northwest Lions were growing claws.
There was only 1 problem – COVID-19. The pandemic made Friday night crowds sparse and restricted public fanfare to small doses, giving Leon Hall’s trademark “rock & roll” atmosphere the vibe of an overly-loud house band annoying revelers in conversation. Hillsboro’s anticipated 2020 playoff run was cut short by an upset loss at the hands of North County, a story that’s grown all too familiar for the Blue & White in recent days. But as the Warriors and Blue Jays found out, the Varsity Hawks didn’t exactly miss-out on any Main Street parades for the county’s state title bids. Mississippi Magazine reported that the COVID-era playoffs felt more like a round of non-conference games, with thin pep squads clapping for 1st downs. Heck, even the 2020 Show-Me Bowl was a small-fry event hosted by a C3 school in Jefferson City.
The fall of 2022 may provide a glorious “do-over” for county pigskin. There are 5 teams with no-baloney chances for District titles, and no all-consuming national health crisis to speak of. Moreover, it isn’t the Fox Warriors who are most likely to grasp at the brass ring this time around.
Hillsboro leads the charge of fantastic local lineups. This is the senior season for Austin Romaine and Jaxin Patterson’s vaunted Class of 2023, and May’s departing senior class was not littered with impact players outside of WR/A-Back Tyler Watson. Blue & White coaches hold their depth charts close to the vest, and allow HHS students to produce confusing misinformation, like the dozens of girlfriends, tag-alongs, and opposing players listed on Hillsboro’s absolute mess of a HUDL roster. We know that at least 3 all-conference linemen graduated in 2022, including Jordan Jarvis, Tucker Vuylsteke, and Greg Sanders. But it was inevitable that most of the ’21 HHS line would win awards after manufacturing more rushing yards than the San Francisco 49ers, and the size of the senior and junior classes of this season indicate that crucial blockers can be replaced. Griffin Ray remains the Hawks’ crafty starter at QB, while junior running back Peyton Brown gives head coach Bill Sucharski a 3rd home-run batter in the backfield. Hillsboro’s defense stoned NCHS and Poplar Bluff in the ’21 regular season, and held Festus to 0 points on offense in Week 11.
Of course, the sour way last season ended could make HHS alumni think twice about wanting a “do-over” of anything. Hopefully, no Hillsboro team of the near future will suffer a shut-out elimination loss after producing a white-hot offense in 9 out of 10 games.
But it would be a mistake to imagine that North County is Hillsboro’s new “arch-nemesis” after flipping the script on the reigning conference champs in 2020 and 2021. For one thing, Hillsboro’s regression in last year’s District playoffs came due to a variety of factors, not simply an NCHS team obsessed with revenge. Modest bumps and bruises on the front lines began to pile-up just as rival defenses began to stiffen – as a result, speedsters Patterson and Romaine had to deal with more crowded hash-marks than they’d faced in Weeks 1-9. Leon Hall hosted a District Semifinal grudge match with Festus in which 2 teams expected to manufacture 60+ total points combined for a grand total of 20. Then, the Hawks hosted a Bonne Terre beast led by QB/DB Nolan Reed and 2 or 3 other D1-scholarship seniors playing at the top of their games, poised to make a playoff run that would take the Buccaneers all the way to Thanksgiving. No single opponent took down the Hillsboro Hawks in 2021. It was a perfect storm.
Good news may be on the horizon, namely that Class 4’s regional field won’t be as unconquerable in 2022 as it was last season. Indeed, the Varsity Hawks can feel fortunate to go into the campaign right where they’re almost certainly slated by MSHSAA, in C4D1 next to a bundle of familiar schools and opponents. Farmington has lost its next QB in the order-of-succession with the transfer of Jeremiah Cunningham to Midmeadow Lane, and there’s no standout senior class to make up the difference, potentially giving the Black Knights their least-athletic team since 2013. Festus High could prove to be a year away from state-playoff form, Cape Central has been slipping down the totem pole, and Sikeston’s recent coaching hires illustrate that the Bulldogs are ready to dismantle the program and start from scratch. Without a follow-up campaign from North County that rivals what Reed’s lineup was able to do, the D1 landscape appears to be wide open for once.
Compare what Hillsboro and Festus are facing to the plights of local Class 2, Class 3, and Class 5 teams. C2 districts are so dangerous that Jefferson has won just once despite fielding Class 4 level rosters in more seasons than not. Lutheran North and Cardinal Ritter are now annual threats to make Herky’s C3 division academic, not Jefferson’s. Class 5, meanwhile, is Jackson High and Webb City’s territory, and there’s not much else to say. Jackson wouldn’t be such a drag on Jefferson County if the Indians weren’t so darn close to the river, making its District 1 seeds inevitable.
Yes, the Indians keep popping up on regular-season Hawk and Tiger schedules these days, and if armchair math is correct, powerful titan St. Mary’s will play in Class 4 this season, poised to potentially knock-out a D1 opponent early in the state playoffs. However, teams like the St. Mary’s Dragons and Hillsboro Hawks have made a decent match for each other in eras past, and this spring’s graduation of several blue-chip FBS prospects could keep St. Mary’s from simply waltzing through November again, just as Cameron Marchi’s departure could pull JHS back down to Earth.
There remains 1 huge problem for the Blue & White in 2022, and that’s the team’s troubling trend of hot starts and icy finishes under skipper Bill Sucharski. Leon Hall peaked early in 2020, whipping Cape Central and North County in successive weeks, then losing to every opponent except Windsor and DeSoto to finish at .500. HHS roared out of the gate in 2021, destroying NCHS on hostile turf with a Turbo Clock, out-lasting QB Cole Rickermann and the Festus Tigers at home, and then winning the next 3 games by a combined score of 150-0. But even as the Hawks clobbered Poplar Bluff by 26 points in Week 9, the playbook was starting to shrink. Ray was getting bitten by the interception bug, and the smaller number of healthy bodies on defense pressed Patterson into mandatory 2-way duty alongside the QB-killer Romaine.
Hillsboro’s front-7 had averaged close to 3 sacks-per-game going into the 2021 District playoffs. Romaine brought down Rickermann an amazing 4 times in the 13-7 semifinal win, practically beating the FHS offense by himself. But HHS pass-rushers went quiet against Reed and the Raiders on the weekend to follow, and a disappointing offense gave the D no such margin-of-error.
Contrast the up-down pattern of Sucharski’s 2 seasons to how former HC Lee Freeman’s teams warmed-up and then peaked in late autumn. By the time 2016 and 2017 rolled around, Hillsboro’s meek debuts were a running source of humor (and hotly debated Friday Night Predictions) on Mississippi Magazine. The Hawks slipped, tripped, and fumbled against Week 1 opponents like Sullivan, St. Genevieve, and Affton in Freeman’s tenure, usually winning the games, but worrying HHS alumni in the process of it. Blue & White fans had predicted a “51-7” final score in 2017’s summer-time clash with Affton, leading to B-back Luke Skaggs’ funny “The Geek was right” warning to coaches once the Bananas scored an early go-ahead touchdown. But after slogging through a series of closer-than-expected wins over DeSoto and other neighbors, HHS tacklers hit the “on” switch against Poplar Bluff, holding Class 5’s conference-champion Mules to merely 21 points in a 1-point loss that felt more like a victory. The offense quickly followed in kind, as a pair of solid defenses from Cape Girardeau and Farmington had no chance to stop a revved-up backfield in the playoff games to follow. Finally, on an icy November night at Leon Hall, the Varsity Hawks scared the “poo” out of Ladue, falling short by a couple of plays after rallying for an epic 2nd-half comeback.
It wasn’t a fluke pattern. In 2019, Freeman’s lineup was the definition of “down,” that High School football term used for a squad whose best athletes are still adolescents in mind and body. Austin Romaine was Hillsboro’s best 2-way performer in 2019, a burgeoning star who already possessed solid speed, extraordinary bone-girth, and fine tackling skills. Romaine was also 14 years old at the time, and rarely played more than 14 “downs” in a quarter. (Seckman High in 2022, with 31 senior classmates surrounding the most-prolific runner in a 200-mile radius, qualifies as this year’s best example of “up,” with Hillsboro, Herky, and St. Pius also qualifying.) The Blue & White were “down” for sure in early ’19, dropping to 0-3 to begin the season. But before you knew it, Hillsboro upset the Festus Tigers by a blow-out score, and then went on to win a Mississippi title before going 1-1 in the playoffs. Earlier, in 2014, the Hawks fell to Festus by another surprisingly lopsided score. But not only did Leon Hall rebound to defeat FHS in a postseason rematch, Freeman’s side never lost to R-6 again.
Sucharski has made no obvious mistakes to produce the school’s November blues. Scheduling a “Godzilla” or 2 in late-summer OOC play isn’t prohibitive of keeping a team on track, in fact, Sucharski has followed the HHS tradition of making “let’s just stay healthy” quotes prior to virtually-unwinnable September scrums against Show-Me Bowl opponents. The 3rd-year skipper has refused to run up scores against struggling teams, even putting his sophomore backups on the field before the scoreboard got out-of-hand vs Northwest in Week 1 of last season. (Yes, they scored some TDs, but you can’t tell ’em not to run fast.) Sucharski’s key rushers, returners, pass-rushers, and QB have all managed to stay healthy going into the District playoffs each year, which shows that the head coach is definitely not running his team into the ground.
Perhaps new assistant coach Russ Schmidt can lend wisdom on how to restrain any “September fever” that wrings-out the Varsity Hawks too soon. Schmidt’s finest teams at Midmeadow Lane tended to start slowly, due in part to the former HC’s steadfast commitment to booking his team into tough situations when conference or District honors weren’t at stake. In 2014, the FHS Tigers traveled to debut against a pass-happy powerhouse in C4’s Westminster right in the middle of August, a scrum played in such steaming Saturday weather that the Army Black Knights would have had problems getting a RB over 150 yards without his having a case of heat-stroke. But the host Wildcats couldn’t have given a whit about the 100+ degree temperature, rotating sets of fresh WRs onto the field to catch short, accurate passes from 2 QBs, and eventually chipping-away for 3 touchdowns. Schmidt’s run-heavy offense was left helpless as sagging, gagging juniors and seniors crawled to the sideline to tag-in their young understudies. On defense, however, the Black & Gold learned much from the ordeal, forging the respectable 27-0 final score with nothing but relentless pursuit. Festus continued to look shaky at the start of Week 2’s bout, but wound up winning 8 times in a 9-game span and upsetting the Clayton Greyhounds on Senior Night.
Schmidt will be pleased to see the Blue & White take on Fort Zumwalt West prior to the Hawks’ crucial Week 4-5 kickoffs with North County and Festus. One of Schmidt’s maxims is that a roster cannot stand up to superior athletes in premier games unless the kids are already used to the mayhem, an angle which definitely played a large role in 2021’s disappointment, since Leon Hall faced nothing but lousy teams in mid-October before trying to tackle a loaded District 1 bracket. Hannibal, which reached 2021’s Show-Me Bowl by tripping North County in a classic state semifinal, only defeated Fort Zumwalt West by 18 points last season.
Hillsboro’s total number of upperclassmen rivals those of Seckman, Festus, and Fox, raising the possibility of Sucharski running more of a “platoon” roster and preserving his players’ stamina and emotions for the stretch run. Surely, by this point, Romaine and Patterson know how to play defense without the every-down responsibilities of edge-rushing and pass defending. If HHS utilizes its early-season mismatches against Sikeston and Cape Central to play 22 starters instead of 15, it will pay-off in the long term.
Sucharski’s staff should also take to heart the late St. Louis writer William Burroughs’ wise words, “If you’re in a pickle, don’t do the logical thing, because it’s your so-called “logic” that got you in the pickle.”
Hillsboro’s natural tendency with an upperclass QB would be to hand Griffin Ray even more leeway to “flex” the Flexbone and examine defenses’ movements after the snap. Hillsboro’s system can be compared to that of St. Charles West, as the Hawks and Warriors each use hand-offs and pitch-outs that appear to be option plays, but they’re not really, because QBs are told to distribute the egg to a certain guy no matter what. A reason the Warriors haven’t been able to match Hillsboro’s consistent success is that St. Charles West features a “30-touch” tailback or slash player all the time, causing the QB’s game to suffer when the Warriors are compelled to improvise on actual option plays. Hillsboro, on the other hand, knows how to play the traditional Flexbone style quite well, but Hawk quarterbacks are either asked to feature a certain rusher or read-and-give as circumstances demand. That gives HHS the ability to change its offense from a power-rushing style to a “Navy” option style at any time, like prizefighters who can switch to a “southpaw” stance.
What if the Blue & White chose to play football just like a dumb, stupid, ignorant countryside power for the first few weeks? (Except for the 22-starters thing, of course.) By simply blasting the ball up the middle or winging around end as the play-call determined, giving even Griffin Ray some designed rushes? The result would involve lots of dull 3-and-outs as opponents successfully guess what HHS is going to do next. It would also involve “Jax” and “Fresh” taking jump-hugs and “lifts” after racing into opposing end zones, because when the entire wave of keying defenders happened to get blocked, the Hawks would score. Hillsboro would easily beat teams like Sikeston, CHS, DeSoto, and perhaps even Poplar Bluff with a TDs-per-play ratio that would make Tim Tebow’s career stats look like Bronko Nagurski’s.
Meanwhile, the savvy, experienced Hawks would be more than ready to bust-out the “southpaw” option tactics at-will against a series of crucial rivals, who come along so infrequently on the ’22 schedule that the HHS coaching staff wouldn’t need to waste any time self-scouting. Even if the burly Festus defense managed to figure-out Hillsboro’s alternate playbook in Week 5, the Hawks could go on to beat the Varsity Tigers later by surprising with a switch back to their bullish style in a District rematch.
Festus High School can boast of SEC-brand coaching acumen with A.J. Ofodile in charge, and a series of shock-revivals is making the rest of Jefferson County’s coaches look pretty good too. But there’s no denying which team has the best skipper to steer Griffin Ray through a senior year at QB for a sophisticated, unique, deadly offense. After all, Coach Sucharski’s staff has a direct line to Annapolis headquarters…and to you-know-who.