I have only seen one of the teams play and that’s Prestonwood North. Here’s my take…Prestonwood has the best athletes and is peaking at the right time. They had Nazarene beat in week 1 (despite being shorthanded due to injuries and playing a bunch of kids who had never played varsity before)…and the coach gave it away. I wasn’t at the Lucas game, but my phone was blowing up with reports that play calling was baffling. They tried really hard to give away their game against Victory. There’s been a common theme where fans keep asking “what are we doing??”
They’re almost at full strength now and some of those first year players are figuring things out. They took it to Nazarene last week. If they hadn’t tried to get cute and just stuck to their game plan, that would have been a 45 in the third quarter. Instead, a couple of unnecessary trick plays turned into INTs and instead of going home early, they found themselves hanging on for dear life. They got the ball back with 1:43 left, an 8 point lead and Nazarene out of TOs, and instead of taking 3 knees and running out the clock, they call a sweep and run it OOB. They were fortunate to get a conversion on 4th or else that could have turned into the biggest choke I’ve ever seen.
I really like what Covenant has done in the past. I assume they have the same coach. That being said, based on results I’ve seen this year, I suspect they are on par with where Nazarene is.
So I see one of two scenarios playing out. If Prestonwood decides to stick with what has gotten them here, I think Prestonwood wins by a couple of TDs. However, I’ve also seen Prestonwood repeatedly change their game plan simply out of anticipation that the defense might try to stop their strengths. Sometimes you gotta just say “this is what we do…stop it if you can.” Unfortunately, I haven’t consistently seen that over the last four years. Last year’s team was good enough to overcome it. I’m not sure about this year’s team.
