Prep Football: Keep On, Keeping On

One would think that after a 61-6 mauling of Massac County last week, perhaps Harrisburg had turned the corner on its season.

In the infamous words of college football analyst Lee Corso, "Not so fast, my friend."

Harrisburg head coach Al Way pumped the brakes when asked if he thought last Friday night's win was a turning point in the Bulldogs making strides the last half of the season.

"You can never say that with the way our schedule is," Way said. "We have our hands full with Benton this Friday night and then have to go to Murphysboro, before closing out the season at home against Herrin and Carbondale.

"Benton's quarterback (Hamilton Page) almost single handily beat us by himself last year and he's 90 percent of their offense. For a kid that is only 160 pounds, it's amazing how many tackles he breaks. He's a good thrower, it's hard to keep him in the pocket, he scrambles and creates things and you can never relax, even if it's 3rd-and-30, you can just never relax with that kid."

Benton won a thrilling 29-28 win over West Frankfort Saturday, but Way likes being at home for a second straight week and is still praising his team for their performance last week.

"I think maybe we played a little bit to our potential. I thought we executed really well offensively. The offensive line did a nice job and I just thought our running backs looked quick. Defensively, outside of one series early, I thought we played pretty solid defense.In a game like that, you get a couple of turnovers and you get on a roll, we jumped on them pretty fast."

For a team that struggled on defense in two weeks against Boonville, Ind., and the following week at West Frankfort, Way and company seemed to have found some kind of magic potion, but again, Way says thats not the case.

"You never know if you've played that much better defensively or if you match up better with what they were doing," Way said. "I thought the kids got to where they were supposed to go. We had a decent pass rush, which took away their running game, which was really important."

Halfway through the season, Way knows his team has squandered a couple of opportunities, primarily in the win column. To him, that's been the most surprising part of the 2016 season.

"We shouldn't be 2-3," Way contends. "The frustrating thing is we lost a couple of games we should have won. Losing to Mt. Carmel, we shouldn't have lost that bad, but we knew that they were going to be really good. We got a great effort at Du Quoin, and then we just had a couple of weeks where nothing seemed to go right. We don't have any soft spots on our schedule the rest of the way through and the positive is we got (Jordan) Bartok through the game without getting hurt. He only played defense and maybe were slighting getting back as healthy as we're going to be for the rest of the year."

Michael Dann covers prep and college sports for the Harrisburg Daily Register and Eldorado Daily Journal. Follow him on Twitter: @spydieshooter.