HOWARD — The next stop on the undefeated Fredericktown Freddies’ dream season tour is East Knox High School, where they will have to contend with a Bulldogs team that has two straight wins after a terrible start. The Bulldogs want to put a blemish on the Freddies’ perfect record.
“(Fredericktown is) a very good football team and a big challenge for us,” said East Knox coach Tom Holton. “I think our kids are anxious to get at it and face this challenge.”
The Bulldogs (2-4, 2-1 Mid-Buckeye Conference) are out to show thay are nobody’s patsy. Soon after getting soundly beaten by Utica on Sept. 18, they learned that Holton would step down at the end of the season. Ever since, East Knox has been Bulldog-tough.
“I think we’re playing better assignment football,” said Holton. “We’re a little better at our fundamentals than what we were before.”
They overwhelmed Centerburg, 33-7, and then last week, outscored an improved Northridge squad, 35-34.
“Offensively, we played pretty well the last couple of games,” said Holton. “Defensively we played pretty well against Centerburg. We didn’t play nearly as well against Northridge.”
The task this week, however, may just prove to be the year’s toughest for the Bulldogs. The Freddies (6-0, 3-0 MBC), on the other hand, have a huge upcoming game against Utica one week from this coming Friday. They cannot, however, afford to overlook East Knox.
“Right now, we’ve got to concentrate on staying focused and taking things one game at a time,” said Fredericktown’s coach Luke Beal. “History will tell us, in the MBC, that anybody can get you on any given Friday. There are upsets that occur in this league every year. Right now, I’m sure that we are one of the teams that people are gunning for, so we have to make sure we are ready to play every Friday night.”
So, is an upset in the offing? The Bulldogs will have to do what nobody else has done yet — stop Fredericktown’s 51-point-per-game offense. In order to do that, they’ll have to do a better job at stopping the run than they did against Northridge, which had a pair of runners who topped 100 yards against the Bulldogs’ defense.
Last week, Freddies’ quarterback Thomas Hinkle ran the ball 20 times for 158 yards and four touchdowns, and completed 6-of-11 passes for 116 yards and two touchdowns.
“They’ve got a lot of weapons,” said Holton. “The quarterback (Hinkle) is a very good athlete. (Tony) Lybarger (who caught four passes for 95 yards last week) and (C.J.) Ruhl are very good. The key for us is how well we tackle. We have to be able to tackle in (open field) and we have to be able to tackle at the line of scrimmage.”
“The one thing that we try to emphasize every week is execution offensively,” said Beal. “We want to try to get the ball into the hands of a lot of different people and not make mistakes. We have to avoid turnovers and keep penalties to a minimum. Those are the things, in most games, that we are really trying to focus on.”
The Freddies, for their part, simply cannot lose their focus.
“(Overlooking East Knox) is precisely the type of mistake we can’t afford to make,” said Beal. “The only thing that we have control over, at this point, is how we play against East Knox. We want to make sure that we control what we can control week-to-week and try not to think about anything else.”
Johnstown managed to hang more than 20 points on the Freddies’ defense last week. The Bulldogs have the speed to get behind anybody’s secondary and put a quick touchdown or two up on the board. Beal and the Freddies will do their best to see that does not happen again.
They will face Bulldogs’ running back Colton Tucker, who ran 13 times for 95 yards, and Devin Wears gained 92 yards on 10 carries last week. Bulldogs’ quarterback Tyler Clement completed 7-of-9 passes for 146 yards, and wide receiver Dakota Anderson had four catches for 77 yards against Northridge. Also, receiver Khai Harralson had a pair of 60-plus yard TD catches against Centerburg two weeks ago.
“We need to be able to run the ball to set (our pass) up,” said Holton. “Then we do have some guys that can get behind (Fredericktown’s defense) and we need to take advantage of that.”
“(East Knox) always has good running backs,” said Beal. “They’ve got some talented receivers this year. First of all, we’ve got to focus on stopping the run. Of course, in this league, that’s something you have to focus on every week but we can’t focus completely on that because they do a good job with play action pass. We’ve got to be able to focus on the run and, at the same time, make sure that we don’t give up big plays in the passing game.”
The Freddies will also have to be wary of the Bulldogs’ speed on special teams as well.
“That was a factor in the game last year,” said Beal. “We didn’t play well on special teams. That’s something that we really want to make sure that we are really solid on.”
“We would like to do (what we did last year) again,” said Holton. “We played well in phases of special teams last year, but (Fredericktown) returned an onside kick for a touchdown at the end of the game. We kept battling back and forth and we got ourselves in a position where, we had a chance if we got the onside kick, but they got it and ran it back on us.”
Undoubtedly, the Freddies are the biggest dog in this fight. This week, they will have the opportunity to see the size of the fight in the Bulldogs.
“We need to be solid in all phases of the game this year,” said Holton. “Especially special teams. The other thing is that we need to take care of the football. We cannot give them a short field because (Fredericktown) will kill you if you give them a short field.”
“Historically, Fredericktown and East Knox is always a great football game,” said Beal. “It’s one of those games where you throw the records out and it really doesn’t matter what happened earlier in the season, it always seems to be a great game, so that’s exactly what we are preparing for this Friday night.”
