Hillsboro 58, Festus 21
The ’22 Hillsboro Hawks look every bit like a Show-Me Bowl contender to TGG. No, we’re not saying that because Hillsboro clobbered the blog’s “home team.” Festus, after a hideous 2-3 start, can’t well claim to be the best opponent that HHS has faced this season. But the Hawks are 5-0 with 5 run-away victories against a tougher schedule than usually goes against the Blue & White, and 2022 is the maiden year of modern memory in which Hillsboro is headed to lambast all 4 of its conference rivals in a row.
Focus will center on a hot Hillsboro offense, of course, but The Geek is more enamored with the HHS defense when gauging Leon Hall’s state playoff chances. The once offense-obsessed triumvirate of Jaxin Patterson, Austin Romaine, and Griffin Ray is now flying around the field making tackles and creating turnovers, with at least 2 and potentially all 3 young men still poised to contribute mightily with the egg in hand in November. An underclass contingent with more speed and mature athleticism than expected is boosting Hillsboro’s defensive backfield. The 2 key fumbles-forced from FHS in the 1st quarter on Friday certainly helped the Hawks win, but those are the types of plays that get WAY too much attention sometimes, as we’ll touch on again just below. There’s simply no compelling evidence that the Festus Tigers would have scored enough TDs to stay in the game even if the Week 5 visitors had not fumbled or taken a penalty, just like it’s not crystal-clear that Fort Zumwalt West could have played a perfect game with the ball and challenged Hillsboro’s defense when it counted. HHS has allowed only a few meaningful opposing scores on the season, none of which came from Highway A’s fierce rivals on Friday night.
That “brutal” schedule has turned out to be a blessing, as the last thing HC Bill Sucharski wants is for the Varsity Hawks to coast again for 4 more weeks, then find themselves playing a bunch of “tuned up” opponents in faster-paced rematches as soon as Districts begin, akin to fighting the 2nd version of “Piston Honda” on Punch-Out. Furthermore, the amazing St. Mary’s Dragons loom as a potential opponent in Week 13. Thankfully, the finest team from Jefferson County will face “Mr. Sandman,” also known as the Cardinal Ritter Lions, in an October game that should let us know exactly where Hillsboro stands in the state-title picture. Cardinal Ritter was defeated 42-0 by a generational St. Mary’s lineup last season, but the Lions were still in post-punishment recovery mode following a cheating scandal from 2 years prior, and it’s safe to say last year’s lopsided result is not how a Lions-Dragons bout would turn out in 2022. Ritter has spent its September smashing a pair of recent Show-Me Bowl champions, Lutheran St. Charles and Helias Catholic, by a combined score of 73-14.
If the Festus R-6 offense played the defense in a playground game, the final score might be 73-14. The Geek will entertain no cries of “FUMBLE!” from Black & Gold boosters who imagine that if the Tigers had held onto the ball more often, FHS might just have beaten Hillsboro 59-58. This year’s Midmeadow Lane offense is not designed to succeed while being under pressure to score on every single possession. Developing dual-threat QBs like Jeremiah Cunningham and Essien Smith are far more effective as “game-breakers” in a tight defensive scrum than in a shoot-out. They’re not in the mold of QBs who can steer a “Jackson” type passing offense and tic-tac-toe down the field on 7 consecutive drives to vanquish an opponent that won’t stop scoring TDs. Without a good defense to have their backs, the FHS skill corps – even with Landen Bradshaw back into the mix at RB – is being asked to do the impossible.
This Festus defense smells. It’s very, very bad, and there’s no measurable reason for the unit to have turned-out to be so awful against good players. Even the undermanned defenses of 2015 and 2017 managed to make some kind of hay against big-time conference antagonists, stripping the ball from Hillsboro RBs and snagging INTs from North County quarterbacks. No defense should be blamed for not coming-up with a bunch of turnovers in a given game – a nice turnover ratio comes naturally when a defense executes and gets to the QB. But it’s hard for opposing offenses to self-destruct when their jobs are so simple. Hillsboro didn’t need to pass, didn’t have to razzle-dazzle, and rarely had to hold on to the pigskin for 10 plays or more. FHS tackling is almost nonexistent on the 2nd level. All good plays for the opposing offense are “explosive” by definition, because Tiger tacklers are glued to their blocks.
There’s no need to be worried about the long-term – yet – with so many big, stout athletes coming up the pike. Like the Jefferson Blue Jays, the ’22 Festus Tigers have beautiful roster numbers on defense but few difference-makers currently playing with poise and confidence. Festus’ difficult scenario reminds The Gridiron Geek a lot of the 2013 team, which scored a googolplex of points but still gagged against Cape Girardeau Central in Week 11, because a talented defense looked absolutely helpless on rival turf. An assistant coach told TGG privately that Festus had picked out the wrong scheme for defenders to play, a conversation that landed your blogger in some hot water 5 years later when he finally mentioned it in a column. But as we recall, the defense got better immediately in 2014, as former HC Russ Schmidt threw aside a fancy “3-3-5” playbook and put his biggest and best rushers at defensive end, allowing Jaden Reddick and Elijah Cummings to dominate on both sides of the line-of-scrimmage for about 10 weeks in a row.
A.J. Ofodile won’t do that, leaving Black & Gold boosters in the weird situation of knowing that Coach O will probably mend the problems, but having no idea how our “OLE!” defense can become a football unit instead of an 11-man bullfighting crew in short order. Except for potentially stopping Jobe Smith and the NCHS Raiders, oh, maybe once or twice on 12-13 opposing drives in Week 6, and hopefully reminding the Buccaneers that Tiger Stadium isn’t being permanently re-named “Automatic TD Garden.”
Flappy & Pitchwell 200, St. Pius 13, Herculaneum 6
Herculaneum and St. Pius X were scheduled to wage an I-55 Conference showdown on Friday night. Instead, the teams were forced to muddle through what’s become a faithful MSHSAA tradition – sending Flappy & Pitchwell to “star” in the show and leave the student-athletes in the background for 4 quarters.
Penalty, penalty, who gets the penalty? The game’s defining moment, other than a postgame glance at “262” combined penalty yards on the stat-sheet (or whatever the final number was), had to have come in the 3rd quarter of the infinitely-long scrum at Hill Valley. The referees called a wacky “chop-block” penalty on a play where 5 Herky linemen were simply pass-blocking 1 player apiece, ruining a long HHS drive and (of course) what could have been an excellent, breathtaking finish for the Tri-City fans in attendance. Jackson Dearing then hit a Blackcat receiver along the sideline for about a 15-yard gain to get the visitors back in business again. But wait – TGG had seen the HHS receiver “curl” slightly inside to catch the pass, and saw Flappy (or Pitchwell) waddle sanctimoniously toward the 50-yard line while stopping the clock again.
“Ohhhhh Lord, no,” The Geek moaned to his folks watching on YouTube. “Now they’re gonna say his foot touched the white line, and they’ll call it back another 10 yards for Illegal Touching.” Sure enough, the refs used yet another obscure rule to put Herky in 3rd-down-and-47. Suffice to say that if TGG had gotten close to either Flappy or Pitchwell in that instant, he might have been thrown in the county-tank later that same night on charges of “illegal touching.”
Mississippi Magazine’s hate mail this week will read as if The Gridiron Geek were bashing a minority group, or perhaps a holy subculture of Bible translators. “Our referees work for very little money and call the games right down the middle,” the emails will say, before going on to challenge the reporter to take part in Friday Night Lights himself as a referee. But nobody really wants that. As a referee, TGG would tell jokes in sign-language at the 50-yard line, and only call “holding” when part of a lineman’s jersey got torn off, meaning that the kids would have more fun, without any yellow flags for MSHSAA loyalists to be sanctimonious about in the first place.
The only “football” takeaway from Hill Valley (taken from red or blue jerseys and not zebras) is that QB Jackson Dearing had a poor game, staring-down too many receivers and tossing 3 painful picks. Dearing, it seems, is more of a “rhythm” quarterback than most, reacting poorly to Friday’s hurry-up-and-wait atmosphere.
But head coach Blane Boss does not need to install a frantic hurry-up offense in case Week 5’s farce happens again, nor does SPX skipper Dan Oliver need to shout “Penalties!” at the conference-leading Lancers for the next 3 weeks. The problem of overbearing referees will take care of itself in November, for TGG has spoken to several of MSHSAA’s playoff refs, and they’re a different breed. “Common sense” is not foreign to them, and MSHSAA teams competing in Weeks 10-15 are given every chance to play ball and settle the score on their own. Oliver and Boss might as well worry about what happens when the Penalty Bowls end and the Lancers and Blackcats have to just go out and perform, as opposed to trying to cook-up a way to deal with frivolous flags on every down.
Seckman 49, Fox 14
Seckman blows away Fox after all, giving Cole Ruble’s team their maiden quality-W of a promising season. SHS can count holding Fox to 14 points as a gigantic improvement over the disaster of Week 1, when Valle U. scored a thousand points against the Imperial kids in approximately 7 minutes. Fox would probably bludgeon its way downfield for more than 2 TDs against Valle’s defense, even though the Warriors were “small and out-manned” again in Week 5, to the tune of leading the St. Vincent Indians 60-7 in the 2nd quarter.
Crystal City 24, Gateway Tech 22
The Geek wrote in August that he would be shocked if Cyle “Battlestar” Schaumburg were replaced by any man, woman, or machine at starting quarterback for the 5-0 Crystal City Hornets. Friday night’s winning play at Gateway showed exactly why.
Trailing via a “22” point Jaguar output on offense (which we hear a lucky handicapper might have called in advance), CCHS faced long chances with 60 yards to go and not much time left to execute a Paul Johnson “Death March.” Gateway Tech had made a handful of mental errors in the game as predicted, but was smart enough to understand the “grinding” aspect of Crystal’s offense goes away when there’s less than 5 minutes left. A courageous series of 4th-down conversions and a time-consuming drive would have left Crystal City with medals for bravery…and a 4-1 record.
But in a flash, there went Battlestar racing up the Milky Way, or at least galloping down a gridiron under the Gateway Arch while screaming Hornets fans began to believe the impossible could be true. Schaumburg went all the way for a 60-yard touchdown that proved to vanquish Class 4’s Jaguars, on a play that a member of the Crystal City program described to The Geek as “an option play, lolol.” But of course it was an option play. What else? Due respect to the wonderful CCHS underclass in ’22, but as of now, Schaumburg is the senior “option” who’s got every opponent on their heels.
The Varsity Hornets aren’t just moving up, they’re soaring, and far quicker than anyone expected. Crystal City is leading the District 2 seeding race over St. Pius (!), Brentwood (!!), and the Duchesne Pioneers (!!!), and surmounts only a single tough challenge on a Friday before taking-on the Herky Blackcats in a Week 9 barn-burner. CCHS pigskin will have to be ranked ahead of Grandview (which took an upset loss in Week 5), Jefferson (which lost twice in a row by convincing scores to begin the I-55 slate), and even the Northwest Lions, who have not yet shown that they can tackle a winning C4 team and emerge with a W as Crystal has.
Remember, we’re talking about a 5-0 team that will retain 25 out of 27 players with more youngsters on the way. (Hopefully, Denise Reynolds, the fine photographer who snapped half of this week’s cover image, will keep capturing the team with an expert lens following son Hayden Reynolds’ graduation.) Crystal City will be favored to go 9-0 in the ’23 regular season, with the main problem being that the schedule looks to be way too easy. If Duchesne wins a state playoff bout in November and is promoted, the path could be wide open for CCHS to make a run in the Show-Me Bowl playoff bracket. That’s heady stuff on a campus that didn’t even know if Friday Night Lights would still be a thing in the 2020s.
Just when it presumably can’t get better, Crystal City High has drawn an especially gainful Week 6 match-up that could help the Hornets grow in confidence and consistency, even though the next opponent would probably always lose on a neutral field. More to come (as ever) in what will be a VERY fun Week 6 Power Poll.
Windsor 27, DeSoto 6
Windsor’s opening drive for a TD essentially ended the suspense at Joachim Junction from the get-go. But the fact that we can say that shows that WHS is becoming a more solid and complete program, since it was more common in the 2010s for low-rung Mississippi Conference games to finish 33-32 with flaky form both ways.
Perryville 50, Grandview 21
Grandview takes its most disappointing, discouraging upset loss since – when exactly? As many issues as the Eagles had with injuries and youth in 2018-2020, we’re not used to seeing GHS falter against the underdogs that the Birds of Prey are supposed to defeat. TGG suspects injuries are the main culprit behind Grandview’s diminishing play this midseason as well, but we won’t pretend to have any useful info on that front until at least Thursday.
Jefferson 42, Bayless 6
Jefferson’s got 2 winnable games coming up on the calendar…but this is a rather unlucky week to host the Perryville Pirates.
Marquette 41, Northwest 0
There’s still no Chase Viehland suiting-up for Cedar Hill on Fridays, but there is a fighting defense that didn’t allow a 75-yard rusher against a far-superior side on Friday…a small ray of sunshine for what’s been a painful autumn in the House of Springs.