Liberty beats Milan with defense, big plays
The postgame celebration for Liberty Tech after its 32-7 victory over Milan in the Class 3A quarterfinals included a chant: “All the way to state!”
They will get about halfway to Cookeville next Friday when they travel to Nashville for the semifinals, and they will arrive as a battle tested team after having defeated the Bulldogs in a tough game that saw both teams hit the other hard all night.
Both Liberty and Milan had a fumble lost for a turnover in the first four minutes.
“Rodney [Castille] never fumbles, and then he dropped the ball on probably his first catch of the game,” said Liberty head coach Tyler Turner. “Rodney never fumbles, but we just had to tell him to put it behind him and play the next play.”
PHOTO GALLERY: Football - Liberty Tech vs. Milan
Castille did play the next play and caught a 34-yard touchdown pass on the following drive to give Liberty its first score.
The Crusaders’ victory means they’re in the state semifinals for the third time in school history, continuing a trend of making the state’s final four every three years after playing until the week of Thanksgiving in 2009 and ’12.
“I was in eighth grade the last time we got this far,” Castille said after the game. “But it feels good to be back.
“We wanted to come out and just play good football and try to come out with a win and keep playing next week. We did that.”
Milan tried to respond on the next drive, but a pass deep in Bulldog territory was intercepted by Alec Long and returned 38 yards for a 13-0 lead.
“I read my keys and kept the ball in front of me,” Long said about the interception and another he had later in the game. “We saw on film when they passed they ran a lot of curl routes, and those can be easy to break on when they start to make that turn.
“So when they did that, I tried to be there.”
Milan scored its touchdown at the end of the first quarter when Anthony Ballard ran 36 yards for the score to cut Liberty’s lead to six points. The lead would stay at that through the second quarter.
“Liberty is a good team,” said Milan head coach Jeff Morris. “We knew that coming in because of when we played them and what they’ve done this year.
“They played up to that level again tonight, and we gave them some help with mistakes we made that shot ourselves in the foot. But give Liberty credit for making the plays when we didn’t.”
Liberty outscored Milan 19-0 in the second half as the defense continued to swarm the Bulldogs’ offense, not allowing much, if anything, most of the final two quarters.
“We didn’t really change much at halftime, just kept doing what we were doing because it was working,” Turner said.
It did keep working as the Crusaders continued to be stingy and not allow the Bulldogs to do much. When they went for the long ball, Long proved to be a deep threat with another interception he caught and returned about 40 yards to give Liberty the ball inside the Milan 30.
It was two plays later when Castille caught his second touchdown pass of the night from 28 yards out to put Liberty up 20-7.
Castille said there wasn’t any other purpose for the team besides simply trying to win the game and advance in the playoffs, despite Liberty connecting in the pass game more this time around when it relied heavily on the ground game in the teams’ first meeting on Sept. 4.
“Whatever we needed to do to win is what we were trying to do,” Castille said. “If that meant I catch passes, then I tried to catch passes.
“If it meant I blocked downfield, I was ready to do that, too. No matter what, we wanted to win.”
The ground game was an effective weapon as Chris Johnson was a workhorse for the Crusaders and got to the end zone late in the third quarter to put Liberty up 26-7. Turner said the aggressiveness the Bulldogs showed on defense was something they thought they could exploit.
“They started running out of the 4-3 defense and blitzing from all angles, so that was something we thought we could capitalize on,” Turner said. “We thought Chris could have some success up the middle and then try to get Corey [Newble] to the edge and run Chris or somebody else to block the guy coming off the corner stunting.
“They did a good job of doing their jobs most of the time and getting down the field.”
Morris said he was proud of the way his team not only played Friday but the entire season.
“We had that slow start with three losses in our first four games, but we never panicked,” Morris said. “We thought we had a good football team, and we had to go play like it.
“We did, and we made it this far and got beat by a team that I think is good enough to win two more games.”
Liberty will now travel to Nashville to take on defending Class 3A state champion Christ Presbyterian Academy, who defeated White House-Heritage 55-21.
“We’re one of four teams left in the state, and that’s a great feeling,” Turner said. “But this team’s not done. We’ve got more work left to do.”
The first item in that work left is to win the game in Nashville next week to make the other half of that trip to Cookeville the following week for the state championship.
Brandon Shields, 425-9751
More inside and online
• Lexington’s season ends with a loss to Memphis East, XX.
• Peabody pulls away from Dresden in the second half, XX.
• Find out the final scores from games across the state, XX.
• Log onto jacksonsun.com to view photo galleries from selected games.