Credit EarnedÂ
It’s the time of year where the bird most people eat is often turkey.
Mine is crow.
All year I touted my belief that Bridgeport, Princeton, Spring Valley and Fairmont Senior were in a tier above all others in Class AAA. Only one of those teams (Bridgeport) will be in Charleston playing for a state championship next week. The other is the Herbert Hoover Huskies who went on the road and dominated Princeton in the bitter cold.
I said if Hoover beat either of those four teams on the way to the title game I’d own it. I came to terms with that reality last week when Princeton struggled to stop North Marion following a downward trend and Hoover throttled Oak Hill. It was the cliche meeting of two teams trending in opposite directions.
Congratulations to the Hoover community and head coach Joey Fields. They proved the skeptics wrong, myself amongst them.
Leverage PointsÂ
I took a lot of heat when I wrote about Princeton’s penalty problems after the Winfield game. I said I wouldn’t write about it again until the Tigers’ season came to an end.
Here we are.
And while the final score would indicate penalties and execution errors largely didn’t play a role in a 35-12 blowout, that’s not true.
Football is as much about sequencing as anything. If a QB throws an interception in the second quarter, not much is thought of it. If a QB throws an interception on a high leverage play such as one in the red zone or one in the fourth quarter while his team is driving, it’s dissected ad nauseam. If you take a sack on third down, not much is thought of it because the drive was likely coming to an end anyway. If you take a sack on first or second down, it’s detrimental because it usually derails a drive entirely.
Princeton finished with 10 penalties for 89 yards in a Class AAA semifinal game. What hurts most is the sequencing of those penalties. They came in high leverage spots.
The first one? It came on a first-and-10 at the 30. It was a hold on a positive screen play that cost the Tigers 10 yards. Up next was a snap issue that turned a second-and-10 into a third-and-20. A 17-yard completion set the Tigers up with a manageable fourth-and-3 at their own 37. They were going to go for it or at least they left their offense on the field. At worst they were going to try and secure an encroachment against the defense. Instead a false start was called, eliminating an opportunity to establish a rhythm on offense and score.
After watching last week’s game against North Marion it felt like scoring early was imperative. Playing from behind against Hoover’s offense is incredibly difficult and everyone who watched Friday understands why. The Huskies move the ball at will and keep the ball out of your hands. It puts pressure on your offense to perform, especially for a team like Princeton that gave up 200 yards rushing in three of its last four games.
Who knows? Maybe Princeton gets stopped there on fourth down and the outcome is the same but the common thread of penalties hung with them until the end. The next big one came after Princeton’s last touchdown. A 16-yard touchdown pass made it a 21-12 game. Princeton was going to line up for a two-point conversion to hopefully make it a seven-point game but an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty after the play moved the ball from the 3 to the 18, eliminating any realistic shot at a two-point conversion. The PAT came from 35 yards out and was partially blocked, keeping the Tigers behind by two scores.
You can be absent a star player or two but still execute cleanly.
“We got a lot of growing up to do, including myself,” Princeton head coach Keith Taylor said. “We got a lot of learning to do, but there’s very few teams playing in the semifinals, so we can hang our hat onto that. We have to go back and look at all the different things that happened this season. 
We had all kinds of points come off the board, and that’s not really the kids’ fault. We talked about it off the record and on the record. You know, that’s my fault. I allowed those kids to kind of play their own way, do their own thing, you know, do the things that they wanna do on TikTok. But we changed our ways, you know? 
I really think we turned the corner there after the Winfield game at the cost of having two guys suspended, but that’s not on them. It’s all on me. At the end of the day as the head football coach here, it’s up to me to have a great game plan and have these coaches prepared we weren’t today and we paid for it.”
I wasn’t writing about the penalty issues throughout the year because of a vendetta against Princeton. My job is to inform my readers of what I’m seeing and noticing. I wrote about the penalties because I noticed a common thread that was holding a championship caliber team back from being the best version of itself. That thread carried through and tripped the Tigers at the end.
A Cold Bitter EndÂ
It’s no secret that run defense hasn’t been a strength of Princeton’s and that’s what made its actual defensive strengths a non-factor Friday. Herbert Hoover stayed ahead on the chains all night with its run game and rarely found itself in situations where it needed to drop back and pass. When Huskies did pass they were effective, completing 4-of-6 attempts and moving the pocket to do so. Princeton’s two best defensive players are defensive ends that can pressure and sack QBs.
The downside to that? You have to earn those pass rush reps with success on early downs. If you’re not able to get teams in obvious passing situations they can eradicate your strength. Hoover dictated the terms of the game all night long.
The Tigers tried to find ways to best utilize stars Kalum Kiser and Daniel Jennings. Kiser was moved to linebacker against North Marion to help shore up the run defense and he played well but it wasn’t until he was moved back to the defensive line midway through the third quarter that Princeton finally got Hoover’s offense off the field. His first drive back at defensive end yielded three runs of six total yards, resulting in Hoover’s only punt of the game.
Starting with the drive where Kiser moved back to defensive end, Hoover ran 14 plays and only two of them picked up gains of more than three yards on the ground. The longest gain, a 41-yard run by Hatfield, went away from Kiser. The down-to-down consistency Kiser provided on the line may have been helpful in keeping the Huskies in check earlier.
“Probably,” Taylor said when asked if the adjustment came too late. “Hindsight’s 20-20, right? We think (Kiser’s) one of the better linebackers on the team. Not making excuses for him, but he’s dealing with an ankle being beat up which everybody is around semifinal time. He was getting in position. He just couldn’t make the tackle. 
Their quarterback and their running back are incredible football players and it’s not just and an average linebacker isn’t going to be able to tackle them and they’ve been doing that all year. We just thought it would be a little bit easier for him to get down there and bang inside. He’s one of our best defensive ends and helps Daniel out on the other side. You see that we started flipping them and they started to flip the same thing. 
So they saw that. That helped us a little bit. It probably did come too late. 
But that was great of adjustment for Coach McClanahan there.”
There’s no guarantee putting Kiser on the line to start would’ve been enough. Hoover’s final touchdown of the game was a perfect checkmate. On fourth-and-14, an obvious passing situation, both Kiser and Jennings flew up field for a sack. Hoover’s call was a QB draw taking advantage of an aggressive pass rush.
As frustrating as the defensive performance had to be for Princeton fans, and I’ve seen that side of the ball taking most of the heat, the game was lost in every phase. Twelve points was never going to be enough to win and aside from a blocked field goal, special teams struggled too. The Tigers’ average drive started on their own 20, a number buoyed by a late return to the Hoover 25.
What’s next?
The season was still a successful one regardless. It took 100 years for the program to reach a semifinal and has now done so two years in a row. Former James Monroe boys basketball coach Matt Sauvage had a saying while his team was in the midst of consecutive championship runs. His players always talked about winning the title and he’d put the brakes on, making sure they took things one step at a time.
“Focus on the journey instead of the destination. If somebody handed you a state championship trophy, it wouldn’t mean anything. It’s why the journey matters.”
I believe at times this Princeton team lost sight of the journey, staring at the destination. The journey was no longer new for the Tigers after last year’s success. And that’s reasonable.
The Tigers were the Class AAA runners-up a year ago, returned most of their starters from that team and dropped into a favorable class when a fourth was added. There’s a fine line in balancing success and it’s not a guarantee. While it stings now, the way the Tigers lost can be constructive if they want it to be.
They were physically dominated in their house by a team they thought they were multiple scores better than. Taylor said so himself. There may not be a more humbling experience in football and that’s the reality of the situation. They knew what Hoover was going to do and the Huskies successfully did it, over and over and over again. They know where they need to get better.
The blue chip players are all back next year. Jennings, Barker, Kiser, Mossor and Moore are all ceiling raisers that make the program a title contender. But football is decided by 11 players working in unison and titles are won in the offseason. Expectations will never be higher than they will be in 2025 which starts now.
Kennedy Ballot
The semifinals have a major impact on my Kennedy ballot each year. This year is no different. My final is attached below.
Hatfield was the biggest mover for me. His four-score seminal performance rocketed him up my board. Truthfully, he’s tied with Vellaithambi but putting both at No. 2 invalidates the ballot entirely. I gave Hatfield the tiebreaker for those points because he went on the road in the 20 degree weather and ran the ball 37 times to upset the No. 1 seed in Class AAA. That’s no easy feat.
Hurricane lost convincingly at Spring Mills and while that matters, I don’t think that should invalidate the other 12 games Vellaithambi put together.
Fagan turned the ball over three times in the semifinals but still led a fourth-quarter comeback charge, was in on the decisive stop on the two-point conversion and recovered the onside kick attempt. I wrote about his case last week and at the end of the day his team’s success against every other top team in Class AAAA is too hard to ignore. I’d be surprised if he didn’t win, but I expect the final vote to be close.
Indy falls in Spencer Â
I was surprised by the final score in Independence’s 42-7 loss at Roane County.
I thought it would be more competitive but Roane’s offense marched down the field at will. I believe the result was a combination of Roane’s talent and a turbulent season that finally caught up to the Patriots. From weather delays to cancelations and eventually a death of a parent in the program, this season was unlike any I’ve seen a program experience.
There’s only so much mental adversity you can endure before needing a reset and Independence was past that point.
That said, if you’re going to get Independence this was the year to do it. Provided the Patriots stay in Class AA, they’ll be a force for years to come. They have another talented crop of middle schoolers coming in and many of their freshmen started and played throughout the season. The quarterback (Brock Green) was a freshman, many of the offensive linemen were freshmen and the leading rusher (Sylas Nelson), tackler (Landon Riddle) and receiver (Christian Linksweiler) are juniors. Their leader in sacks (Isiah Conley) is a sophomore.
If they stay healthy and together, they have a chance to bring multiple titles to Coal City. But again, success isn’t a guarantee.
Title Game PicksÂ
I believe we’ll have a slate of competitive title games in Charleston next week aside from the Class AAA game. That’s not a sleight to Herbert Hoover, just a nod to how good Bridgeport is. The Indians would handle any Class AAA team in the field this year.
The Class AA game might set the record for fastest game with a pair of teams that will load the box and run at each other. That one’s a coin flip for me but several of the Frankfort players who won a baseball title in the spring play football as well and I value that championship game experience.
Class A: Wahama 30, Cameron 24
Class AA: Frankfort 21, Roane County 14
Class AAA: Bridgeport 63, Herbert Hoover 7
Class AAAA: Martinsburg 28, Spring Mills 14
