By Michael A. Lough

The Sports Report

centralgasports@gmail.com

          At the home of so much hardware, FPD or Bulloch will walk off the Paulson Stadium field with a trophy of their own Saturday night after the GIAA Class AAAA championship game.

          If Erk Russell is watching from above, odds favor Bulloch, because there’s a serious Georgia Southern influence floating around the Gators.

          The head coach? GSU graduate. Some assistants? GSU graduates, including one who played on the offensive line 20 years ago.

          The offense? Well, of course, the patented-under-Erk-and-Paul Johnson triple option.

          “They’ve got some Georgia Southern roots from that old Paul Johnson coaching tree,” FPD head coach Brett Collier said. “One of their coaches on staff played at George Southern with Adrian Peterson, so there's a lot of those old connections. They know what they’re doing.”

FPD Vikings
Eagle’s Landing Chr. 10-0
Marion County            49-21
St. Anne-Pacelli          6-18
Brookstone                  6-3
Pinewood Christian    47-0
Westfield                     28-23
Mount de Sales           45-3
Stratford                       28-14
John Milledge             49-21
Tattnall                         27-20, OT
P-Stront Rock               28-13
P-Bethlehem Chr.       34-0
GIAA championships: 1980, 1984, 2023
GIAA runner-up: 1979, 1983, 1988, 1989, 2001, 2004, 2005

Bulloch Gators
Portal                            19-18
Claxton                         38-13
Augusta Christian       28-0
Robert Toombs           42-7
John Milledge             35-6
Strong Rock                 49-14
Frederica                     14-0
St. Andrew’s                55-0
Pinewood Christian    48-7
P-St. Anne-Pacelli       37-0
P-Brookstone               20-14
GIAA championships: 1978, 1982, 1983, 1997
GIAA runner-up: 1977, 1981, 1998
Predictins

Maxwell Ratings/Georgia High School Football Daily: Pick ‘em

The Central Georgia Sports Report: The versatility of Bulloch’s one-dimensional offense – running different schemes out of one look, a look FPD hasn’t seen – will put a lot of pressure on FPD’s defense.
          Of course, the same goes for FPD’s offense against Bulloch’s defense, which must handle a variety of receiving threats and a legitimately multiple quarterback.
          It makes for a fascinating chess match, loaded with nuances in the first quarter that may come back in play in the fourth quarter.
           And there will be changes in flow and tempo. But the Vikings have a definite advantage in kicker Dominic Economopoulos. On a turf field and clear night, that’s huge.
          Pick: FPD by 5

          The Vikings and Gators finish the GIAA season with the 8 p.m. kickoff in a stadium that’s home to a program with 11 conference championships and six national (FCS/I-AA) championships, and some state legends.

          FPD and Bulloch hope to come out of the game with some of their own legacies being built or enhanced.

          The Vikings are trying to repeat, having won last year on a college campus not too far from home, Mercer, while Bulloch tries to do the same thing, albeit for the first time since 1997, when the Gators finished off Eagle’s Landing Christian 21-20 in the GISA Class A finale.

          The historical perspective of defending a state title in the GIAA is meandering. Class AAA was the largest class, regular season and postseason, until the year FPD, Stratford, Mount de Sales, and Tattnall rejoined the association from the GHSA.

          This is the second year of a split, with Class AAA only for the regular season, and then a split of the largest schools into two classes, 3A and 4A, for the playoffs.

          John Milledge took advantage of the schools’ visit to the GHSA (from 2010-11 to 2021-22 for FPD, and 2014-15 to 2021-22 for the other three) by winning four Class AAA state titles from 2016-2022. The Trojans won in Class AAA in the first year of the split and took second last year.

          St. Anne-Pacelli topped Stratford in the first Class AAAA championship, and FPD took out Brookstone last year in the second title game.

          The Vikings went 2-9 in their first year back in the GISA/GIAA, and in Greg Moore’s final year as head coach. Collier was promoted, kept the staff pretty much intact, and went 9-3 in 2023, competing with John Milledge –still amid a dominant run – in a five-point loss, three weeks after falling 28-14 to GHSA Class A/Division II Commerce, which went 11-2 and reached the quarterfinals.

          History is nice, but the present is the present, and it pits the 11-1 defending champs against an 11-0 team that hasn’t been on this stage in a couple decades.

          Bulloch head coach Aaron Phillips is in his third season with the Gators, and is 25-8, a pair of 11-win seasons following a 3-7 debut.

          Collier is in his second year as FPD’s head coach, in his second stint with the school. He was an assistant from 2014-16, then spent three years at Eagle’s Landing Christian before returning to FPD. Longtime head coach and athletics director Greg Moore named him before the 2022 season as his successor after the season.

          That was a teaching moment of a season, a disappointing and surprising 2-9 that proved a table-setter for the current success. Indeed, the Vikings in a five-game losing streak after a season-opening win lost by a total of 36 points. They were outscored by only 5.4 points a game for the season.

          A year later, losses became wins for a senior-heavy team. And a year after that, more wins, and now a chance at finishing FPD’s best two-year record of 21-4-1 with a win in program history.

          First things first.

          The Gators and Vikings haven’t met, and Bulloch doesn’t have much experience with Bibb County teams: 0-2 vs. Stratford, 0-1 vs. Mount de Sales, and 4-1 against Windsor.

          Longtime John Hancock head coach Bob Peck and former Tattnall boss Clint Morgan both coached at Bulloch, Peck winning one region title and going 31-25 (1987-91) and Morgan taking a region title in seven season en route to a 55-27-1 record (2004-2010).

          Bulloch was supposed to host Tattnall on Sept. 28, but Hurricane Helene took care of that.

          One Bulloch advantage is familiarity. The Gators played Portal at Paulson Stadium back in the middle of August in the Erk Russell Classic. Access is easy, since the school is just a short ride on the Statesboro loop from the stadium.

          Phillips came to Bulloch from Edmund Burke, where the Spartans reached three football semifinals and won two state baseball championships. He moved up from offensive coordinator, and had been at the school for 10 years when he took the top football job.

          Assistant Charlie Hopkins was a four-year letterman for Georgia Southern, graduating in 2006. Zack Brackett is a Gatewood grad who, like assistant Robbie Holder, attended Georgia Southern.

          And they run the triple option that made Georgia Southern Georgia Southern.

          Tradition, however, has nothing to do with Bulloch’s execution of and FPD’s defense of the offense. The pressure is on the Vikings’ D against an unfamiliar scheme, no FPD opponent running any sort of option-oriented attack, fairly surprising over a full GIAA season.

          “I’m really thankful for it,” Collier said of not having to prepare all season for anything like a Wing-T or bone option. “Until now. Our kids are seeing it for the first time this year.”

          In the regular-season finale, Bulloch held Pinewood Christian to less than 150 yards while running for more than 500 in a 48-7 win, Shamar Jenkins getting 179 and Ike Hubbard 115.

          “We want to be big, physical and nasty up front,” Phillips told the Statesboro Herald after the win. “They take pride in that and they like being that kind of guy.” 

          The Gators knocked off Brookstone, last year’s runner-up, 20-14, one touchdown coming on a 29-yard touchdown pass from sophomore quarterback Sam Hubbard to Billy Crider. Down 20-0, in part because of three Bulloch interceptions, Brookstone scored twice in less than a half-minute late before Bulloch’s defense ended the rally.

          Fullback Danye Garvin and Sam Hubbard make the offense go, but the Gators – who don’t post stats on MaxPreps - also throw a monkey into the preparation wrench by running pro-style stuff out of the option sets.

          “You've drilled your players all week on who's got fullback, who's got quarterback, who's got pitch, and then they run all their non-option stuff,” Collier said. “So the non- option run game is what's hardest to defend because the kids are so locked in on the on the option stuff.”

          That magnifies the need for near-perfect reads and tackling, especially from the linebacking unit – led by Brady Lincoln and Brady McHugh – and secondary – keyed by Major Simmons and Bennett Lake.

          Bulloch has given up the second-fewest points in program history this year, trailing only the 61 giving up in 1983 when Bulloch went 11-1 and took the Class A title. They’ve racked up the seventh-most points in program history (source: Georgia High School Football Historians Association).

          But it’s that clock-eating ball-control offense that does teams in.

          “With the style of Bulloch’s offense, with the running game, the games are shortened so much,” Collier said. “Possessions are limited um so most of those close games … You look at the Frederica game. The final score was 14-0. But Bulloch was in control of the whole game. 14-0 for them is 28-0 for most people, because you don’t have time.”

          Other than the massive difference in offensive philosophy, the Gators and Vikings have plenty in common, starting with similarly gutty and physical quarterbacks – Sam Hubbard and two-way stalwart Simmons - on down the line. Neither will be the biggest or fastest or most athletic team the other has seen this year, and neither has always been the biggest or fastest or most athletic team on the field.

          “They're probably the most complete team,” Collier said. “They're a little bit like us in the fact that some of their kids are undersized – now, some of them are huge, don’t get me wrong - but they play really disciplined, they play really sound, they play really hard, and they're tough.

          “It's tough to find a weak link in the armor.”