Sneaky Good

Midland Trail – this team isn’t ranked yet in our Single A rankings, but they have the capability of being a difficult matchup for anyone. They currently sit at 4-1 and just came off a tough win over rival Summers County. Their passing attack makes them difficult, and if you have questions about your secondary, I wouldn’t want to play them.

Clay County – I will preface this; they have one of the weaker schedules in Double A. I still believe they are a good team, though. They had a close game with Double A quarterfinalists Roane County, a 2021 quarterfinalist. I wish we could see one more matchup to see where they are at, but they are a solid team.

Other non-ranked teams who are worth following are Weir, South Harrison, or Pendleton County.

There’s really no one in AAA that is sneaky good this year. It’s pretty much chalk in that classification. We’ve talked plenty on Wheeling Park, Hurricane, and Princeton. It’s the same characters this year. Maybe next year we will have a team really surprise people.

Streaming

There has never been a time where it’s been as great as this to be a fan of high school football. A huge thank you is deserved for the people that stream these games on Friday nights. Ten years ago, maybe even five years ago, this was impossible to do. You followed updates on Metro News and Twitter. Now, we can sit at home and watch multiple games, flipping it from channel to channel to watch the action.

There’s so many out there to thank from the crews in the Eastern Panhandle that put the games on YouTube to the crews like Video Productions that put on a ton of games each week (in all sports). They don’t get thanked enough, and honestly, they deserve a ton of credit for allowing us to catch the action. Not to mention that almost every radio station that covers games now streams live on the internet. There have been countless games lately that we haven’t been to watch, but we listened to (radio still has the anticipation build-up of a big play or a big situation that just can’t be replicated on TV).

Lastly, I do believe it adds an element for the players as well. It’s cool to think that hundreds (sometimes thousands) of people are tuning in to watching you play. This is such a great opportunity for so many people to either watch it or listen to it on Friday Nights.

Gimmick

There has been a weird trend lately- one that is rather funny in a couple of respects. The word that people use is gimmick. More particularly calling an offense a gimmick. The term now applies to the Wing-T, Flexbone, and other versions of offense that aren’t “mainstream” anymore. Parents and fans alike have flipped their thinking over the past decade. There may be quite a few coaches that feel the same way, and I believe that people are wrong to believe that.

Part of the reason is that people equate what they see on TV with college and NFL as similar to high school. It is drastically different on levels that some will not comprehend. The speed, size, and level of talent as a whole is not even in the same world as the high school game. They truly are two separate. That is not even mentioning the difference in time allowed to practice.

That doesn’t mean that one is better than the other- it’s just different and that should be okay. The spread is now the king of football schematics. It’s believed to be the solver of all problems, and if you run a spread formation, you’ll automatically be a state champion contender. Obviously, I am being facetious, but the idea that the spread will solve your problems is kind of funny.

If your talent doesn’t match the schemes that you are running, it doesn’t matter what you run, you will not be as successful as you could be. There are teams that should never run the spread. They don’t have the skill personnel to win on the outside, and the majority of the time they will not have the quarterback with enough skill to be the runner or the thrower they need to be. Without the stress of the outside skill positions or the skill of the quarterback, the offensive line will be overwhelmed by packed boxes.

Also, with these offenses slowly going away, teams will struggle knowing how to stop it. It’s the same thing that happened initially with the spread, spread option, advent of RPOs, and other offensive evolutions throughout the game of football over the last 15 years. Coaches begin to figure it out, and how to stop it. The idea that you can’t win playing one of the “older” forms of offense is incredibly mistaken. There are programs all over the nation that destroy opponents week in and week out. They are well-coached, and they execute their offense at a high level. To say that you can’t win doing it is simply not the case and probably comes from being misinformed.

If you ask the majority of veteran coaches these days, the offenses that scare them the most are the unconventional styles. The Flexbones, Wing-T’s, Hybrid Spread Wing-T’s, etc. You’ll see teams start to adapt towards what Coastal Carolina has been doing. The spread schematically doesn’t scare you- it’s the players that scare you. Wing-T and Flexbone teams scare you because you have to coach it right to stop it, or they will make you look like a fool.