The Gridiron Geek is a man of many-things-balanced. This time of the year, it’s easy enough to keep up with the English Premier League, since the NFL hasn’t started yet. The friendly Limeys (with the Big Oil moolah) are even considerate enough to plan early-season Premiership kick-offs around the launches of American football and other sports, partly because there’s getting to be a preponderance of pigskin fans in the UK. Champions League soccer is another story – the UEFA brazenly begins its main “cycle” just as the “seasons” of the NFL and FBS are kicking off and right as the PGA Tour comes to its season’s conclusion.
Oh, and the pennant race is on too, and NHL hockey starts in several weeks. Not that UEFA cares a hair on Ronaldo’s head. The Champions League happens when it happens, and that’s bad for cross-sport bloggers who must cover the weirdest, wackiest competition ever. You can count-out at least 11 or 12 teams from any chance to win the stupid thing, but they’re all full of fanfare and excitement anyway. Real Madrid won the Champions League last year after getting upset by Sheriff Tiraspol, a club that’s not even from a country but from an outlaw town in Eastern Europe, run by mafiosos who pretend to be Soviet loyalists. (TGG kids you not, padawans.) But the experience of blogging Champions League football comes in handy in the way of trial-by-fire – it’s just about the only sports-writing gig that could make the I-55 Conference look ordinary.
What can be said about a league in which the biggest school (Perryville) with the biggest squad (Perryville) with the most preseason numbers (Perryville, again) could finish dead-last without a single victory? In which the 2 smallest remaining schools, St. Vincent and St. Pius, could become prohibitive favorites in 2022? How about Jefferson’s “coaching change” taking place in such a way that we absolutely know the Blue Jays will continue looking like themselves this fall, and yet last season, a pair of old friends of the Dunklin R-5 program – Blane Boss and skipper-turned-helper Cody Hunter – improvised a new paradigm of offense at Herculaneum right smack in the middle of the campaign, and at long last, found a formula for the ‘Cats to start to win.
Big is little, old is new, and everything is upside down. Yet like with the Champions League, we pretty much know which 1-55 teams are going to be on top (and which teams will sink to the bottom) by the time Week 8 rolls around. The carnival trick is to peg the exact order-of-merit with Perryville and Bayless in, and Valle U. missing along with CCHS.
TGG’s 2022 Preseason I-55 Conference Rankings
1 – St. Pius Lancers
2 (T) – Jefferson Blue Jays
2 (T) – St. Vincent Indians
4 – Herculaneum Blackcats
5 – Grandview Eagles
6 – Perryville Pirates
7 – Bayless Bronchos
TGG won’t pretend to be an expert on High School pigskin from Perryville, but it’s easy to guess St. Vinny’s will be superior to PHS on the gridiron this autumn. St. Vincent returns well over 20 upperclassmen from a lineup that held Park Hills Central to 40 points (no small feat for a Class 1 program) and terrorized the conference with blow-out wins and 4th-quarter drama in 2021. Perryville, on the other hand, had a miserably bad Jamboree Weekend despite showing up with enough dressed-out kids to man a Class 6 team.
Last weekend’s St. Pius Jamboree was living proof that numbers aren’t everything in MSHSAA. Crystal City didn’t show up with its entire new-and-improved roster of 26 for the preseason scrum, at least judging by the subtle derision of old hands who protested that CCHS “still has only a couple of substitutes.” Perryville, by contrast, took the field with what appeared to be a small army of new players in Green and White. St. Pius X also brought a sizable contingent to its host Jamboree. But the talented Varsity Hornets went on to beat Perryville *and* St. Pius by a combined score of 6 touchdowns to 2, with QB Cyle “Battlestar” Schaumburg even scoring on a busted play against the Lancers. The St. Pius vs Crystal City preseason battle featured a litany of freshman novices and shouldn’t be counted as a knock against the I-55 side. The CCHS-Perryville mismatch was a different story, a decisive lacing in which the Pirates’ 40+ player squad was of no use.
St. Pius X and Jefferson High will field excellent senior classes in ’22. The Geek’s street-basketball buddy Collin Smith has graduated after thrilling fans with the “Hill Valley Howitzer” last season, but the kid who caught and ran with the fateful throw (“HERE THEY COME!”) is back as Dabrian Moss prepares for a potential banner 12th-Grade campaign. A handful of massive linemen have matured into trench-leaders on offense and defense, including John Leicht, Karter “Bone-Girth,” and Michael Argana. Coach Dan Oliver’s principal worry has to be keeping that big OL healthy, for there aren’t too many sizable kids ready to take command on the LOS if anything happens to the top unit. Jefferson High may not have such a problem with depth this time around, for the 2022 Blue Jays’ balance of veteran leadership and youth is as beautifully organized as any recruiting effort in the county. JHS’s Class of 2023 standouts include rusher Sam Stokes, quarterback Gavin “Well Done” Theodoro, and an edge-rusher in Konnor Armstrong who led the ‘Jays with 4 sacks and dozens of QB-hurries last season. Those aren’t easy statistics to rack-up in this era of MSHSAA, even when your opponents pass the ball more often than prep teams used to.
But if there’s reason to believe 2022 will be a vintage year for JeffCo football, it starts with the underdogs. Nobody wants a predictably top-heavy conference. The good news is that Herculaneum is among the schools with the tools to compete with local big-shots for a change this year, given the Felines’ overwhelming majority of returning skill-players and a diverse 12-man Class of 2023. Herky quarterback Jackson Dearing could almost be called a novelty as the I-55’s old-fashioned pocket passer. Dearing’s “rushing” stats from last campaign, for instance, amount to something like 11 “attempts” for negative-3 years. Yet the kid’s got a passing arm with which to pilot an NFL-style offense, and with a veteran OL to protect him in ’22, it might be Herky’s turn to start churning above-water and reach a District seed that doesn’t book the #1 for Week 11.
Grandview will continue to be a fighting underdog. Those who tuned-into MyMoInfo’s training camp report from GHS might have expected to find a downtrodden, rag-tag group without former HC Dave Dallas and last year’s tremendous crew of play-making seniors. To be sure, it’s bittersweet for Mississippi Magazine to report that Chase “Napoleon” Wilson is now a Westminster Avenue alumni (if still a Field Marshal) and that Dallas has at-least-temporarily ridden off into the dusk after building a playoff winner from scratch, having forever proven his point to those pesky boosters back in Bonne Terre. But the video revealed something quite different from a small, undermanned squad without the Class of 2022 prancing on the practice field.
GHS has itself some big, burly linemen left over from last year’s underclass ranks. Austin Blankenship is getting attention as a contender for the local “Pat Fischer” prize as the best LB under 200 pounds, but The Geek is just as excited about Grandview’s potential pop on the line-of-scrimmage, which is to say, watch about halfway through this video and tell TGG there’s not at least 1 lineman who “pops” the ol’ eyelids.
Why rank the Perryville Pirates above the Bayless Bronchos, given PHS’s bad Jamboree performance and the vast improvement shown by Bayless late in 2021? Mississippi Magazine maintains that Perryville will eventually be an I-55 contender as a Class 3/Class 4 “bubble” team playing against kids whose parents weren’t even blowing bubbles the last time their campus had that many students on it.
As for Bayless? First learn stand, then learn fly, Daniel-San. That brief 4th-quarter surge at Hill Valley last October was great, but the Bronchos picked the wrong conference to try to build a positive W/L record in for the time being. The good news is that the team’s ’22 schedule is bookended by weak opponents in Principia and DuBourg. Week 4’s game vs PHS will be a test of who can place, and who must finish in the cellar.