McNine4MVP

Smyrna really struggled with the cramps throughout the game Friday night. Shadrake, Wilks, and even Crouch (come on underDawgs....you were laying some good wood in the secondary, but you started cramping too on that blown dead fumble recovery) left with some heat related issues. One thing about Brentwood is that they will be in quality shape. I really like Smyrna in this game because they just have better players, but it would not surprise me one bit if Crawford pulls this one out. I guarantee you that Sonny will see more than two coverages this week. Hey Underdawgs, I got a scheme question for you? Why did you guys not attack the seam more against LaVergne. They were walking the DE out on you in the slot, but you were getting the free release against what looked like Cover Three in the first half. After you cleared down the seam 10 yards, poor #4 was in trouble all day because Rod was killing the Corner and he was shading that side, but Shad never attacked it. Now I realize that you don't call the plays, but I just had to ask. You could have had 150 yards against that poor scheme LaVergne was running.

LaVergne 27 Smyrna 24.....................Smyrna has had some distractions and LaVergne has all the motivation in the world. I was on the Bulldog bandwagon, but they don't sound ready. A-Rod and Gray will make two HUGE plays in this game. Riverdale 44 Siegel 14.......................Look for the Warriors to make a statement in Coach Aydelott's debut in the Garnet and Gold. Parks will have a good game, but he's all the Stars have. Oakland 28 Blackman 17...................I think Blackman will be much improved, but Oakland may be the most improved team in this region. I think Oakland has more balance and better play outside the hashes. Mimms may run for 200, but look for the Pats to run up over 200 yards in the air. Wilson Central 23 Hendersonville 17 .................WC is another cryptic team you can't get a read on, but Hendersonville seems like they are stuck in neutral. I look for Aaron Scott to be the difference maker in this game. Independence 35 Page 21.............................I've said it for months, I am on the Independence bandwagon this year like I was on the Wilson Central bandwagon in 2005 and the Ravenwood bandwagon in 2004 (you can dig up the posts if you don't believe me). The Eagles are the Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson of Region 6, they could crash the playoff party this season. Look for them to make a statement tonight. Turnovers is the only way they lose this game. Franklin 35 Lincoln County 24........................I like Franklin to exert their passing game on the Falcons early and often tonight. Campbell may have a big game for the Rebels.

A kid like that in that spread offense can be dangerous. It will be interesting to see how he develops under Woodward. I'm just glad to be hearing some good reviews about my alma mater. Hopefully this Davis kid can keep his head on straight and not blow his chance like Eric Locke did.

When are the tickets for this game going on sale. Can you pick them up early or at least before Friday afternoon???

Chris Gray is nice, and I have one question for the D-B faithful........................HOW MANY SENSABAUGH'S ARE THERE??????? Geez, there have been about 100 of them up there.

That scrimmage result validates two things that I have predicted about this season. 1. Antioch, if they play the way Coach Woodward wants them to, is one team that I would want no part of in November. I mean, yesterday's matchup could be a first round playoff game. If you're going to beat them, you better beat them before the end of September. 2. Ravenwood is going to have a hard time winning Region 6-5A. They have suffered some key personnel losses and they are going to miss Wilkerson as much, or more, than anybody they lost. He was a very good athlete and matched up well against speed teams. From what I've heard, Antioch was playing at a totally different speed than the Raptors were. This team may be battling Indy for the third playoff spot in the Region.

Wow, I can't wait for the battle of North Rutherford County in two weeks!! Chris Gray sounds like he's ready, and Smyrna sounds like they are going to be ready as well. I will agree that Smyrna's secondary is their weakest link. They gave up a lot of big passes in the Riverdale playoff game and both Melvin Williams and the tall kid from Wilson Central gave them the business too. Certainly an area of improvement for the Bulldogs. My question will continue to be is Shadowens going to feature Maceo more in the running game. Last yeat, Harris would get hot, and then he'd either be on the pine or the play calling would get pass happy. Now, if I had Sonny, Rod, Sam, and Crouch, I'd throw it a bunch too, but that just opens more lanes for Maceo in the run game. Smyrna, if their heads are right, is a scary, scary team to play against. There are no weaknesses on offense.

Butler used to be a wild man back in the day, but his abrasive attitude got the worst of him after a while. He is a good football coach and if he has calmed down a bit, that is good for him. The statements about Coach Aydelott are absolutely true. I think Riverdale won in the Rankin for Aydelott "trade." Gary would still be there complaining about not being able to get every athlete in Rutherford County in RHS anymore, while Ron is just going to coach the guys he gets to be the best they can be. Rankin miffed me when he started complaining about the zoning restrictions.....I mean the Boro is growing and there are more important things than football that need to be considered. Gary is only as good as his players are, with his vanilla scheme, where Ron will adapt to the strengths and weaknesses of his guys all the while caring for them as individuals. I think the Warrior program needed some class and accountability at the top and Aydelott gives that to them. I guess that's just that old school Lower Antioch raising Coach A got!!! I have been far from a Riverdale fan, but I will root for them now that Ron is there. That's how much I think of him.

I don't see Siegel having enough offensive balance to get in the playoffs in this region. Corven left, Corven right, Corven up the middle. That just isn't going to work against Riverdale and some of these other teams. Siegel does match up well with Smyrna and can compete, but they may have the worst balance of any team in the region other than Blackman. That is a recipe to finish 5th or 6th in this region.

Franklin Brentwood Ravenwood Independence I'm on the Indy bandwagon and I have a good track record on these new schools making big leaps. Two years ago I was on the Ravenwood bandwagon and last year I was "Ridin Dirty" with Wilson Central. Independence is that team that is going to make the Quantum Leap this season. They have the coach and the system.

I think either Siegel or Lebanon could stay in the playoff race until late in the season. Lebanon seems to drum it up every few years and this could be that year. Also, Parks at Siegel may be the best player in a region full of star players. If he can get some help, they could contend for that 4th spot.

I just can't avoid picking Riverdale. I personally think Aydelott is an upgrade in X's and O's over Rankin. With that said, I don't think the talent level is quite what it was and there will be an adjustment to a new, Wing-T offense that may sputter some in West Murfreesboro. I love Smyrna's offensive football team, and adding Youree with Rod and Crouch to upgrade an already talented WR unit could put them over the top. My only question with the Bulldogs is Shadowens. He's a pretty good coach, but his personnel deployment baffles me at times. I think Maceo Harris is a phenominal tailback, but he hardly touched the ball in some games last year. If he gives the ball to Harris 20 times a game, and uses Hendricks in a RB/Slot Receiver role, they can win the STATE. I'm picking WC as the third place team in this region because I like Scott a bunch as a QB. He's the Tom Brady of the region, Gray may put up better stats, but Scott wins games. I'm picking LaVergne #4, and some people may find that crazy, but I don't think they are going to sneak up on people like they did last fall. They have some nice pieces, but I predict that they are going to be that team that everyone falls in love with, but can't quite get over the hump. With that said, they would be a nightmare game for Cookeville in the first round of the playoffs.

I wonder where David will end up. He's a good player, but I don't know if any major D-I school is going to give him the car keys to the offense. I just have to wonder if he may end up back in Rutherford County, considering Clint Marks is a Senior and DW could come in and play in 2007.

Skinnycat, Are you serious. Ravenwood just won a 5A state championship and TC didn't take 20 snaps under center last year. Times have changed since the last time you watched a 5A football game, I suppose. Look at a school like Southlake Carroll in Texas, who wins in the highest classification, using the spread offense. Hoover, AL is another national power who throws it around too. Just because you have an axe to grind with Scott leaving Ezell (which he had to), don't go dumb and irrational to do it.

I've never been really eager to trust the LaVergne's of the world. One week they are world beaters and the next week they can't hit water if they fell out of a boat. Thomas has done a great job over there to make them a trendy pick to advance pretty far this season, but I still don't think they are any more than the third best team in their county. Now, that's not a slap because you can be the third best team in Rutherford County and still be a Top 10 team this year. Riverdale is still going to be the favorite, but I have to admit that Smyrna, on paper, is a team that really can win this thing. ARod, Tillery, Gray, and those kids are really good players, but Rod, Antoine, Maceo, and Sonny are at least just as good and Shadowens has been doing this a while now. That will be a great season opener!!!

After getting involved in this thread, I certainly have to get down to Thompson's Station and see Independence play. I wish I would have known that there was a scrimmage last Saturday. I really respect Scott Smith as a coach and as a man. To respond to HitorBeHit, never dated a dude (not my style), but I played some WR for Coach Smith at Antioch right before he went to E-H, and I've always admired the time he puts in to his profession. He's always been on that cutting edge of innovative coaching and hasn't been scared to push the envelope. Tennessee needs more coaches like that. Without ever seeing them play, I would guess that they could compete for the 4th seed this season.

Let's break that region down. Brentwood with Crawford at the helm will always have a good squad. He's a great coach and a good man. However, the Ravenwood influence is getting felt in the numbers at BHS and could hurt them some in the next few years. Depth really hurt them in the playoffs last season when their QB went down. Ravenwood is on top of the world right now, and they earned it, but pretty much everybody they had that did something with the football is gone. They've lost the best QB in this area and some good assistant coaches, so a step down this year is very possible. Franklin looks like the favorite on paper, but Clayton didn't impress me the way I thought he would. They do have a gamebreaker in Campbell, that could put them over the hump in this region. This Centennial pep rally is kind of funny, because if you take that one stunner over perennial playoff underachiever Antioch, they haven't done much, ever. To compare Centennial and Indy is easy, it equates like this...... .Smith >>>> Gregory, and when the numbers are even, this will be plain to see. I'll go with Franklin, Brentwood, Ravenwood, and Indy as my four out of this region. And trust me, a Gallatin or Antioch wants no part of Scott Smith in a first round playoff game.

All this stuff about Scott Smith not caring about anyone but himself is a bunch of bs. That guy is the guy that made it fun to play ball every day for me. Is Scott VERY confident about his ability to coach the game.....HECK YEAH he is!! But he cares tremendously about the kids that give their efforts for him. I just think there is a lot of Hatorade being gulped down in Williamson County, because we can all see that there is some momentum being captured down at that program. By 2007, nobody will probably want to mess with that program. Scott would probably rather be respected than liked anyways, so stop the cryin.

I haven't gotten a chance to see Indy play, but if you look at some of their scores from down the stretch last year, they started to play a lot better football. Looks like they made a lot of improvement with a young squad. One thing I can promise you is that Scott Smith is no fool, by a longshot. The guy knows what he's doing and has a state championship ring on his finger to prove it. Without even seeing them play, I think they could very easily get into that #4 slot in that region this year and no worse than the first team outside the top 4. They seem to be the team that is really coming up in that region, while the Brentwood, Ravenwood, Franklin trio seem to really be stuck in neutral at best, with the losses each has sustained. Brentwood has lost a ton over the past two years, Ravenwood loses TC, big Becker, Williams, Wilkerson, and Coach Woodward, and Franklin truly seemed to be schitzo last year. You have to like Franklin though, because they have the best player in the region in Campbell. I have a question for the Indy players online. Is Scott still running the spread, or has he gone back to a more conventional style of play. Also, do you guys have any scrimmages planned for this week, or are you done??

Who is looking like the frontrunners to win the QB job at AHS?? Is it going to be a young guy, or is it going to be a holdover from last year??

Things have been quiet lately regarding the Antioch football program. The Coach Woodward hiring was quickly forgotten about when the Rankin, Aydelott, Blade thing went down. I just wanted to see if anybody had heard about the progress over in Bear Country??

McNine's 5A Top 10: 1. Oak Ridge 2. Dobyns-Bennett 3. Smyrna 4. Gallatin 5. Riverdale 6. Ridgeway 7. Ooltewah 8. Wilson Central 9. Farragut 10. Brentwood

Thanks for everyone's feedback. I apologize if it sounds like I was coming down too hard on Coach Harris, Jimmy, and Lucas. Those kids are talented athletes and have accomplished a lot and Coach Harris has done a lot of good at a very young age for a coach. I got a chance to meet JO at SportsCom last summer and he's a solid kid, but he's just that, a kid, and he lets his emotions get the best of him, much like I did at 18. I wish both of those kids the best and hope they go on to have solid collegiate careers and get their degrees. I just hate it that Siegel did not seize the opportunity that presented itself last weekend. I have no doubt that they could have beaten Hamilton.

First, I want to congratulate the Siegel Stars for an amazing two year run in men's basketball. No matter what anyone on this board says, you guys have achieved a lot, and hopefully learned valuable lessons that will propel these young men in the bigger game of life. However, there are some issues from an outsider's perspective that troubled me all year about this team and those issues came home to roost at a horrible time for the Nation. Let me give you some background on myself. I'm a 24 year old black guy from Nashville that played football and basketball in the late 1990's. So, I'm not one of these good ole boys on here that don't like the earrings and rap music and look for anything to pick on America's youth about. Let me tell you, I know talent, underachievement, and discipline problems when I see them. Some of my teams at Antioch back in the day were the poster children for that when I was in high school, until I graduated in 1999. I have recently moved to Murfreesboro and have picked up a liking for the talent of the Siegel Stars basketball team. I've watched 10-12 games this year and the sky was the limit for this team. They had all the components of a championship high school team. Size, speed, shooters...but they were missing two key things that every championship team has........leadership and discipline. I have gotten the chance to meet Chris Harris several times, and I must say that he is a quality human being. I think he will continue to be successful, but I hope he learns from the mistakes he made with this team. In his defense, sometimes, the most talented teams are the hardest ones to coach, and this team was no exception. But, as a old coach told me, the wind blows hardest at the top of the flagpole, and he is the figurehead of this program. So he will get the majority of the blame. Some of the things that he lets go on in this program are just unbelievable. Here are several points on why this team fell short this year: 1. The multiple technicals and repeated mistakes that SEVERAL of Harris' guys make are almost unbearable to watch. Lucas Jones and Jimmy Oden, in particular, have made killer emotional mistakes over the past two years that have really kept this team from reaching their goals. Now, those two guys are good players and they aren't bad kids at all, but there needed to be a cracking of the whip, at home, and in practice. I mean, my dad would have raced muy coach to jerk my butt up after the first unnecessary technical, so these parents need to be blamed to an extent also. Every day, it becomes clearer why these guys did not stay at Oakland to play for Randy King. Randy runs a much tighter ship, but that is why his less talented Patriot teams give Siegel problems every time they play. I don't know if those guys are mentally tough enough at this point to play for a guy like King, but if they would have stayed and conformed or if Harris would have shown some much needed tough love at Siegel, they probably would have won even more. If you don't think it can be done, look at Whites Creek. The majority of those kids come from a 20 times worse environment than anybody at Siegel has even driven by, yet Jim Nollner commands a respect and he disciplines EVERYBODY on that squad. Dominique Rouse is a talent, but when he was playing lax early, Nollner took his rear end out and gave him the business on how things needed to be done. Rouse went back in and played hard the rest of the game. Its amazing how an old white guy can command the utmost respect of 12 inner city black kids when the expectations of the program are spelled out from the jump. Those kids would try to run through a wall for that guy because there is a built in respect there and they know the parameters and that there are consequences for each and every action. There is no gray area in that program. It's Jim's way or the highway and I respect him for that. He does it the right way with limited resources. I guarantee you that those Siegel kids wouldn't run through him...........NOT EVER!!! 2. When you have a dominant talent like Keith Ramsey, wouldn't it be nice if you threw him the ball just about every trip down?? Jimmy Oden is a pretty good ballplayer, but Whites Creek has some tough, quick on-ball defenders and they learned what I can't believe just got exposed about Oden's game..............HE CAN'T SHOOT. That Tim Wakefield knuckler he shoots will go in about 25% of the time from 3. They just played up and and when he penetrated Jordan and Rouse were waiting on him so they could beat it out of bounds. Gosh, I hate to rip a kid, but Jimmy Oden, in my opinion, is one of those chemistry killers, a la a Stephon Marbury that is he** when he's well, but can't when he ain't. He's bound and determined to score on a team that he really didn't have to. It was apparent really early in that game that he was going to have a rough night. He was more hesitant and unsure then I have ever seen him and he generally looked not ready to play. That is when you need to make a conscious effort to get Keith the ball EVERYTIME. Shoot, Tyler is the only guy that understood this concept all year, for some reason. If I was the coach, I would have put Rod and Caleb in with Tyler, Darius, and Keith and run it like the district tournament, when, what do you know, they played their best ball. 3. This team had no true vocal leader on the floor. I really think Tyler wants to be that guy, but when you have four seniors and a sophomore, one of those upperclassmen shold have been that dude. This is the Brandon Ross effect. Brandon wasn't the most talented guy in the world, but he was a vocal leader who would also lead by making a key steal, dive on the floor for a loose ball, or just vocally rally the troops. Ross' graduation was a huge loss for this program. He meant way more to that team than statistics. This isn't a total rip on the Stars' basketball program, this is just an observation from an outsider. I wish Jimmy, Keith, Luke, Darius, and Rod all the best, but I hope they learn a life lesson at this time of disappointment. I'd love to hear takes on my opinions from people more in the know than I am about Siegel basketball. Have at it!!

Siegel by 8. Remember, that Siegel-Whites Creek game was the day after a Siegel loss, on the road. This is basically a home game for the Stars and as much as I love Coach Nollner and the Cobras, I just don't think they have as many ways to beat you as Siegel does. Whites Creek reminds me a lot of Temple, when they had it going under John Chaney. They would run that matchup zone and frustrate people, but if the score ever got up in the high 60's and 70's they had a hard time winning. Whites Creek is very good, but their offense leaves something to be desired sometimes. Something tells me Siegel may get the pace of this game up and unless Rouse has a HUGE game, the Stars will win.