PLEASANT VALLEY --- Too much stock sometimes is put into one set of football letters instead of the other - that would be Ws and Ls instead of Xs and Os. Pleasant Valley coach Jeff Davis can attest to that. Case in point, his game last week with Wellborn. The Panthers entered Friday night’s game winless, but Davis said he knew better than to look at their record alone. Those losses had come to Class 4A Saks and region foes Piedmont and region frontrunner Leeds.
“I told (Wellborn’s players) after the game, a lot of teams in our region would be in the same situation if they’d played those same teams,” he said. “ … I knew before the game, we’d be in a dogfight.”
The game, a 28-7 victory for the Raiders, didn’t turn out to be a dogfight, but much of that reason might have come from one single gutsy bit of Davis play calling. Just after Pleasant Valley’s Kyle Bean capped a six-play, 67-yard scoring drive with a 2-yard touchdown run, Davis went Riverboat Gambler on the winless Panthers with an onside kick.
The Raiders recovered it and turned it into a spirit-breaking touchdown when Joseph Faucett crossed into the endzone from 1 yard out. The following extra point made it 14-0 --- all before Wellborn had even touched the ball.
And as game-changing as it was, it was almost something the Raiders didn’t do.
“We’d worked on it all week,” Davis said, “but we never could get it right. I bet we kicked 75 to 100 onside kicks. We’d get one to go 6 yards, the next would go 20 yards.”
The 14-point lead couldn’t have been more important seeing how the rest of the game shook out.
Pleasant Valley didn’t score again until late in the first half. After a would-be Michael Lockridge 89-yard touchdown was called back on a penalty after stopping the Panthers on fourth down from the 11, the Raiders punched in later in the drive. The touchdown was called back to the 40 and Bean scored from 21 yards out seven plays later.
The score turned out to be nearly the final offensive success the Raiders had until late in the fourth quarter --- and the Raiders didn’t even manage another offensive touchdown.
Wellborn went to the air behind the arm of Andrew Ferguson and scored on the opening possession and cut the lead to 14.
“Now, Wellborn’s a good football team,” Davis said. “But the worst thing that happened to us was intermission. We just kind of got complacent.”
Pleasant Valley set the final in the third quarter when Dalton Thompson picked off a Ferguson pass at midfield and returned it for a touchdown.
Pleasant Valley will turn its attention to Jacksonville for its non-region, midseason game.
While Jacksonville has only one victory on the season, the game greatly concerns Davis. The Golden Eagles are two classifications bigger in size and much more than that when looking at the size of the two squads offensive and defensive lines.
“They’re going to dwarf us,” Davis said. “That’s going to be the difference in the game if we can control their size on the offensive and defensive lines.”
