Although the postseason may be a long ways off, the lessons learned by Junction City in their clash tonight against Lake Village may go a long way toward the Dragons having a chance at having a lengthy stay in the postseason.
The Dragons (1-1) and Beavers (0-2) meet for the first time since they were league rivals in the 6-3A back in 2017 when Junction City came away with a 36-24 win.
Kickoff is set for 7:30 p.m. from David Carpenter Stadium.
The Dragons enter off of a 20-0 win over Smackover last week with their defense limiting the Bucks to just 32 yards of total offense.
The Beavers have fallen to 4A foes Monticello (34-20) and Dumas (27-20), but what concerns Junction City coach Brad Smith is the Beavers’ relentless ground game out of the Dead-T.
“They’re a very, very good, dangerous football team,” Smith said. “When we faced them before, they were spread, very intricate play settings. They’re not in formations now, they are in two tight ends, unbalanced, Dead-T, and they use their size and their athleticism to their best advantage. They come right at you, and they do it play, after play, after play. They play extremely hard. They have four to five really good running backs, huge offensive and defensive lines. It’s going to be quite a challenge this week.”
Regardless of tonight’s outcome, Smith said seeing a team run the Dead-T will be beneficial going forward.
“The more stuff you see before you get to the playoffs, the better off you are,” Smith said. “Teams have sort of forgotten the old blood and guts, trench warfare. When you run into somebody like that, they’re really, really tough to deal with because you’re so out of focus with having to do it.
“It’s like having to play the old wishbone. You have to get ready for run, after run, after run and play it. What you see every once in a while, especially in the uppers, is somebody will get in the wishbone or single-wing, and they’ll give really good teams fits because they haven’t seen it. We’re just glad we’re going to be seeing it.”
Although Lake Village may be 0-2, Smith said their offense hasn’t been slowed down.
“They run about four plays,” Smith said. “They run them one after another and another. Nobody has stopped them. They moved it all over Monticello. They were down to the 18 to make it a one score game. They had Dumas beat. They were ahead of Dumas and had a turnover inside their 10 and got beat either on the last play or second to last play of the game. We feel that Dumas and Monticello are both very good football teams, so we’ve got our work cut out for us.”
Smith said the Beavers will provide a stern test for the Dragons’ defense, particularly up front.
“Most teams you play, that if you play something really well, they’ll get away from it, they won’t,” Smith said. “If you see the Monticello film, they do a good job of stopping them for a quarter and a half to two quarters, but they keep running the same stuff and finally start getting the best of Monticello. At the end, they had Monticello on the run, but they got far enough ahead of them that it wasn’t a factor. They got down quite a bit, but they played just brutally hard. They believe in what they’re doing. It’s going to be tough because it’s going to be repetition, repetition.
“People talk about coach (David) Carpenter and how good he was. His big deal was, ‘This is our offense and no matter if you’ve stopped it five times, you’re going to have to stop it six, seven or eight more times because that’s what we run, that’s what we do.’ Great confidence in what they do, which gives your kids confidence, which makes it work.”
In their win over Smackover, AJ Ivory ran for 135 yards and Jamal Johnson had an even 100 yards and three touchdowns for the Dragons, who had 334 yards rushing, but turned the ball over five times.
“Offensively and defensively were great performances,” Smith said. “I think we ran for in excess of 340, 350 and held them to under 50 yards of total offense. They never threatened our end zone. I think they crossed the 50 but never got deep down there. We controlled the run game, controlled the throw game, played really great defensively. Offensively, we played great except for fumbling three balls into or out of our own end zone.”
Smith said the key to the Dragons’ defense against the Bucks was consistency.
“If you get out of position with them, they’re going to score,” Smith said. “We got out of position one time and he got a big gain, but they got a penalty on it. When we played what we were supposed to play, we were very, very effective.”
If the Dragons are to win their second straight, Smith said his team must build off their performance from a week ago and cut down on turnovers.
“Consistency and holding on to the football,” Smith said. “You can’t be real high, you can’t be real low. You’ve got to concentrate on every play for sure, but when you get closer and closer to your end zone, that’s when the concentration level has got to go up. You’re about to hit paydirt, so you have to be cognizant of people trying to strip the ball.
“We had a bunch off offsides penalties, and some of that is aggression. We were really getting after them, but I think they had eight first downs total and six of them were by penalty. That goes back to inexperience and youth. We’ve got some older guys starting but at new spots. That’s just the nature of the beast. You’ve got to cut them out when you can. It’s like we said on Friday night, ‘I’m glad we played really well, but glad we didn’t play well enough where we couldn’t gripe and throw a few fits during the week and be listened to.’”