STATE FINALS ARE SET!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

By
December 10, 2006

The State Semifinals are in the books. Your winners are Richland Springs and Rule in Division 1.
Vernon Northside and Jayton won in the Division 2 Semifinals.

I have already heard from some of you and I am sure there will be others. I picked Rule by 14 and Richland Springs by 14. Rule won by 45 and Richland Springs by 38. I was surprised by both scores.

The BAD news? OK. How about Division 2? Well....... I picked Whitharral in what I said would be an upset. The score I picked was Whitharral beating Jayton by the score of 30-24. The actuall score was Jayton 75 Whitharral 66.

I picked Gustine to beat Northside by the score of 46 to 36. The score was Northside 76 Gustine 29. Am I good or what?

So, the GOOD news? ABILENE, ABILENE, prettiest town I ever seen. BOTH, count'em! Both CHAMPIONSHIPS for Six-Man will be played in Abilene at Shotwell Saturday December 16th.

I attended both of the Division 1 Semifinal games. Friday night I made my way to Comanche to watch two very good undefeated teams, Blum and Richland Springs, take on each other. The key word before this game was DEFENSE. What you had were two teams that had given up an average of 9 points per game. Unbelievable! I knew, you knew, something would have to give.

Well, Blum's defense gave up seven TD passes. Seven TD passes thrown by Tyler Ethridge. In case you don't remember him, he set the national record for career touchdown passes in Six-Man a few weeks back. He is a Junior by the way. It just so happens that the 4th touchdown pass in this game broke yet another record. There is a young man named Graham Harrell who plays for Texas Tech now that threw for 167 career touchdown passes while playing11-man ball at Ennis. That is an amazing record. The new record now stands at 171 and is owned by Mr. Tyler Ethridge.

Tyler finished the night completing 23 of 32 passes for 381 yards and as mentioned, 7 td passes. He also added 145 yards rushing and a td run of 17 yards. His main choice of weapons was Mark Williams who caught 7 passes for 150 yards and 3 of the 7 td passes thrown by Ethridge.

Blum did everything they could on defense to try to stop the Coyote's offense. They rushed one, two, and on a few occassions three players trying to contain Ethridge. These were not your run of the mill defensive players either. They were very good players. They did sack him a couple of times, maybe more. Most of the time though, Tyler worked his magic. Blum's coach, Gary Talafuse said in tribute to Ethridge, “about all we could have done different to slow Ethridge down was to have tried playing 9 players on defense.”

Michael Arrington, Blum's outstanding back gained 126 yards on 21 carries and scored three touchdowns.

The score by quarters: 1 2 3 4
Richland Springs 24 8 24 8 64
Blum 8 12 0 6 26


Saturday I went to Lubbock to watch Rule and Meadow. Let me just say right now that in Rule they spell Cats with a “d”, as in DEFENSE.

Meadow came into this game with an offense that had scored 804 points. They left Lubbock the same way. Rule shut them out! 45-0. I do feel there are several reasons for this. It certainly was not a great game on Meadow's part. I also believe that most of the reasons were the players wearing the Rule uniforms. Meadow gained 135 yards of total offense. Six times Meadow either gave the ball up on unsuccessful 4th down plays or by fumbling the ball away. It is somewhat ironic for the Broncos to be bitten so hard by the turnover bug because that is just opposite of their game last week with Garden City. Meadow got the turnovers last week and turned them into a 20 point victory. Not so this week and it cost them dearly.

Much had been made about speed (Rule) and SIZE (Meadow) during the days leading up to this game. Rule's speed is indeed lethal. Rule has shown all season that they were a balanced team passing and running coming into this game. Meadow in their loss did a great job in shutting down the Bobcat running game. Rule gained 80 yards rushing on 20 running plays. Meadow did not have near as easy a time in stopping the passing game of Rule. The Bobcats wound up completing 17 of 22 passes for 211 yards. Rule used 6 different receivers to accounts for the 211 yards.

It is usually kind of a “given” that as you prepare your team to defend against the other team, you “key” on one or at most two particular players on the other team and when you do your job, you are usually successful in your efforts. Rule poses a big problem for their opponents because it is difficult to stop 6 or more players. ONE TEAM ONE DREAM. Rule uses that as their motto and plays the game on the field like they mean it.

Saturday 3:00 PM Shotwell Stadium
Division 2 State Championship Jayton (12-2) vs. Northside (13-1)
The experts have installed Jayton as a 13 point underdog.

To follow afterwards at 7:00 or 7:30 PM
Division 1 State Championship Rule (12-0) vs. Richland Springs (13-0)
The experts have installed Richland Springs as a 15 point underdog.

My predictions on these games will appear later in the week.

Thank you for reading.

Don Hardin
txsixii@yahoo.com

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