Recap
The last time Hanna took the field, it spent the first half chasing Westside and the second half running the Rams down. A 21–7 halftime deficit turned into a one-score game. A Westside offense that had moved the ball at will went the whole fourth quarter without a point. Hanna had the ball at the Westside 15 with under three minutes left before it came loose, and the Rams held on 28–21. The full story is in last week’s Hanna Between the Hashes. That post ended with Hanna waiting to learn who it would host. Now it knows. Indian Land took care of Greenwood, so the team coming to Anderson on Friday is the one that came here last year in this exact round and ended Hanna’s season on the final drive. The regular season was the part of the year when a loss could be absorbed. Nobody is absorbing anything this week.
Previewing Indian Land
The new RPI formula decided plenty of things this fall, but it rarely cut anything closer than this. Hanna finished at 0.64042 and Indian Land at 0.63417. That 0.00625 gap made the Jackets the best-rated region runner-up in the Upper State, with the No. 4 seed and a week off. The Warriors took the No. 5 seed and a first-round game. It is also the reason Friday’s game is in Anderson. The bracket was always going to send the No. 5 seed here if it won its opener, and Indian Land did. For the second straight year, these two programs meet in the second round on Hanna’s home field.
While Hanna rested, Indian Land hosted Greenwood, and for one quarter the Eagles made a game of it. Then the Warriors scored 21 unanswered points in the second quarter, added two more touchdowns after halftime, and closed out a 42–7 win that looked a lot like the rest of their season.
Indian Land comes in 9–2 and finished 5–1 in 4A Region 3, second only to South Pointe. The season opened with a 49–0 win over Charlotte’s Harding University High School, then hit a wall against Northwestern, the number 1 team in South Carolina, in a 54–7 loss. The Warriors answered with four straight wins: 49–28 over Butler, 39–0 over Trinity Christian out of North Carolina, 47–22 over Catawba Ridge and 39–6 over York. Then South Pointe beat them 35–20. They haven’t lost since, beating Lake Wylie 42–6, Clover 21–13 and Nation Ford 49–0 before Greenwood. Stretch it across two seasons and Indian Land is 20–4, and the list of teams that have beaten them in that span is exactly two names long. Northwestern has done it three times and South Pointe once.
So what powers an offense averaging better than 36 points a game? It starts with junior quarterback Matt Kucia, who has thrown for 2,379 yards and 36 touchdowns on nearly 60 percent completions. Add his sophomore season and he has surpassed 5,000 yards and 60 touchdowns in two years, completing 64.6 percent of his throws. Those numbers get more interesting once you remember who he lost. Hayden Morris and Sequel Patterson both went over 1,000 receiving yards last season, and both have graduated, Patterson currently on the University of South Carolina’s football team. Most offenses would spend a year figuring out who catches the ball next. Indian Land just plugs in the next guy.
Kenneth Wilson III leads the group with 39 catches for 745 yards and 14 touchdowns. Maxwell Curry is right behind him with 29 catches for 630 yards and 11 scores. Neither one is a possession receiver. Wilson averages better than 19 yards a catch and Curry nearly 22, and together they account for 25 of Kucia’s 36 touchdown passes. Hanna saw this kind of problem against Westside. Lock down the top two targets and the next two are nearly as dangerous. Isaiah Thomas has 23 catches for 370 yards and five touchdowns. Running back Kylan Foye has added 16 catches for 259 yards and a score out of the backfield.
Foye is the piece that keeps a defense honest. If you pull bodies out of the box to deal with all those receivers, he is the one who makes you pay for it. He has 1,054 rushing yards on 146 carries, a little more than seven yards every time he gets the ball, along with eight touchdowns. A team that can run like that doesn’t need to throw it deep. Indian Land throws it deep anyway, and on purpose.
Everything about this offense is built around taking big chunks of the field. The Warriors average more than 8.4 yards per play. They went over 400 yards of offense in six of their 11 games and topped 500 twice. And those types of plays have hurt Hanna this season.
None of that works without the line. Indian Land’s offensive line is athletic and moves well. It reminds me of the fronts Hanna saw from Wren and Powdersville. In my opinion, it is the best pass-blocking line the Jackets will have faced all season, and it is mobile enough to get downfield and lead the way on screens when a defense brings pressure. That last part matters, because it takes away the usual answer to a quarterback with time to throw. Send extra rushers, and Indian Land can dump the ball short and let those linemen go find somebody to block.
The defense runs on the same fuel as the offense, which is speed. It reminds me of the White Knoll defense, fast from the back end forward, with no level where you can count on outrunning anybody. Senior linebacker Jackson Conner is the centerpiece. He has 119 total tackles after making 150 as a junior, along with two tackles for loss and two forced fumbles. Up front, senior lineman Jackson Headley is the problem Hanna’s offensive line has to solve. He has three tackles for loss and three sacks this season after six sacks a year ago. He is the player most likely to put the Jackets behind the chains.
The scoreboard backs all of that up. Indian Land has allowed 15.5 points per game, and in its nine wins that number drops to about nine. When people hear “fast defense,” they tend to picture cornerbacks running stride for stride with receivers, but speed can be just as smothering against the run. An offense can win the line of scrimmage and still watch a run that might have broken loose get cut off after a modest gain, because a linebacker or safety closed the gap before it opened. Those runs aren’t failures. They just turn would-be explosive plays into ordinary ones and force the offense to stack up more snaps to get anywhere, and every extra snap is one more chance for a drive to stall. If you watched South Carolina against Texas A&M last week, you saw the extreme version of that. The Gamecocks gave up 457 total yards and only three field goals. This Indian Land defense will live with giving up some yards as long as the drive ends in a kick. If Hanna has to settle for field goals on Friday, it could be a long night.
If all of that feels familiar, it should. Last season Hanna beat Greenville in the first round, and Indian Land came to Anderson for the second. Hanna led by two touchdowns at one point in the third quarter. Then the Warriors scored 21 points in the fourth and won 43–41. They threw for 500 yards that night, with three receivers over 100. Morris had 197 yards and two touchdowns, Patterson had 141 and a score, and Kenneth Wilson had 130 and a score. Kucia started the game as a sophomore but left during the final drive because of an injury. Patterson, the star receiver, came in and threw the game-winning touchdown, a 90-yarder. It was one of only three times in program history that Hanna scored 40 or more points and lost. When the Jackets get to 40, they are 116–3.
Go back to that list of receivers for a second. Morris and Patterson are gone. The third name on it, the one who was the third option that night, is now the first one Hanna has to account for.
There may not be a corner of South Carolina that has grown the way the Fort Mill and Lancaster area around Indian Land has, and the football program has grown right along with it. Indian Land was a Single-A school in 2009 and stayed in Class AA until 2015. Now it bounces between 5A and 4A depending on the reclassification year. Change that fast usually comes with growing pains, and this team seems to have skipped them. It has the firepower and the numbers of a program that has been big for a long time, and it is coming back to Anderson to prove that again.
Indian Land doesn’t have a weakness that jumps off the page. The offense hunts big plays behind a line that can protect, the defense turns would-be long gains into short ones, and over two seasons only two teams have figured out how to beat it. The Warriors also have last year. What Hanna has is the home field, a week of rest, and a defense that has been at its best after halftime all season. It also has a seeding margin small enough to remind everyone how even this matchup was always going to be. The question for Friday is whether Hanna can make this a game played on its terms before Indian Land turns it into a track meet.
The Friday Formula
Don’t Let a Loss Beat You Twice
The Westside game had everything attached to it. A rivalry, a region title, a shot at the No. 1 overall seed, and a city that had been ready for it long before kickoff all were riding on that Friday Night. Coming up short on all of it at once is the kind of thing that can sit on a team, and it has to be put away now. If any of that game drifts into this one, with the season on the line, the regular season won’t be the only thing that ended with a loss. The whole season could.
I don’t expect that, because I’ve watched this team answer too many times this year. The Jackets have clawed back from deficits, closed out teams that hung around too long, and responded after a loss before. The best evidence may be the Westside game itself. Hanna went into halftime down 14 with 75 yards of offense, against a team that had carried the No. 1 ranking. It came out and won the second half 14–7 and had a chance to tie in the final minutes. A team that folds doesn’t play a second half like that. I don’t see this week being any different.
Pass Defense
Everybody remembers the long pass plays, because they’re usually the ones that swing a game or end in the end zone. Hanna has given up 21 passes of 25 yards or more this season, which is 9.8 percent of all attempts against it, or close to one in every ten throws. Eleven of those went for touchdowns.
That number is about to be tested. Indian Land will take shots downfield all night, and last year it threw for 500 yards in Anderson and won with a 90-yard pass. But look closer at those long touchdowns and something jumps out. Eight of the 11 came in the first half. The damage happens early, and then it mostly stops. Westside followed the same script. It hit a 72-yard touchdown on its third possession, scored 21 points in the first half and seven in the second, and got nothing in the fourth quarter. Once this defense settles in, the pass rush starts getting home and the throwing lanes start closing. Hanna has to weather the early storm on Friday and give itself time to become that defense again. I expect it will.
Full Speed All the Time
We talked about this before the Mauldin game, and it applies again with more at stake. The week off has to show up as a help rather than rust, and the clearest way to prove that is to come out fast. Hanna scored first in six of its 10 regular-season games and went 5–1 in those games. Scoring first isn’t required, but it works a lot like a good grade early in the semester. I learned the other side of that one back in school. Dig yourself a hole early and you spend the rest of the year carrying pressure you never needed.
Hanna fans also shouldn’t expect this one to look like a lot of first-round games did. Indian Land pulled away from Greenwood with a 21-point second quarter last week, but the teams still standing are the last eight in the Upper State, and from here on these games figure to be decided late. That cuts the other way too. If Hanna gets out to a lead, the foot has to stay on the gas. A year ago this same Indian Land team trailed by two touchdowns in the third quarter and scored 21 in the fourth. Whatever the scoreboard says on Friday, Hanna needs to play like it is behind and keep playing its own game.
All three of those keys come back to the same idea. Indian Land is going to land some punches early, through the air, with a quarterback and receivers who have done it to Hanna before. The Jackets don’t have to win every one of those moments. They have to keep the first half from getting away and let the second-half team they’ve been all year take over, without letting Westside or an early lead change who they are. Do that, and this becomes a four-quarter game, which is the only kind this Hanna team seems interested in playing.
Statistically Speaking
As the playoff starts for Hanna, let’s jump into how Hanna has fared in the playoffs throughout history.
Hanna is 28–37 all-time in the playoffs. Split it by location and it starts to look like two different programs. At home the Jackets are 22–14. Everywhere else they are 6–23. In playoff openers at home the record climbs to 17–7, and the recent version is better still. Since 2015 Hanna is 9–2 in its first playoff game and 8–1 when that game is at home. Under Coach Tone the Jackets are 6–1 in playoff openers and 7–7 in the postseason overall.
The number this game may hang on is 30. Hanna is 21–3 all-time in playoff games when it scores 30 or more and 7–34 when it doesn’t. Lower the bar to 20 and the record falls to 2–26, a 7.1 percent winning percentage. Raise it to 40 and the Jackets are 13–1, and the lone loss is last year’s game against Indian Land.
What makes 30 interesting this week is how neatly both teams line up on either side of it. Indian Land has allowed 30 or more points twice this season, 54 to Northwestern and 35 to South Pointe, and those are its two losses. The Warriors have also scored 30 or more in eight of their 11 games and won all eight. Meanwhile, not one Hanna opponent reached 30 during the regular season. Both teams have spent the fall living on their side of the same line, and on Friday one of them has to cross it.
If it comes down to the final minutes, which is how this bracket is shaping up from here, history hasn’t made it easy. Hanna is 8–18 in playoff games decided by seven points or fewer and 3–8 in games decided by three or fewer.
One last bit of history. Hanna is 0–2 all-time against teams from Lancaster County. Both were home playoff games, a loss to Lancaster in 1975 and last year’s loss to Indian Land. That’s fifty years apart, the same county, the same result. The third try is Friday.
Wrap-Up
A year ago, Indian Land came to Anderson in this same round, and when it left, Hanna’s season went with it. The game came down to the final drive and a throw from a receiver pressed into duty at quarterback, and that was the last picture of the 2025 season anyone in Anderson got to keep. Now the Warriors are back, from the fastest-changing corner of the state. Not long ago this program played small-school football, and now it carries itself like it has always belonged with the big ones. It brings a new set of receivers, a quarterback with two years of experience making defenses pay downfield, and a defense that makes every yard feel borrowed. Waiting for it is a Hanna team that spent the fall winning big and winning close, lost its rivalry game on one of the final possessions, and has had a bye week to let all of that settle.
The two were separated by a sliver this fall, close enough that the bracket could just as easily have sent this game the other way, which feels about right for two teams matched this evenly. Somewhere further up the bracket there could be a trip to Gaffney, and maybe, if the football universe keeps the appointment it seems to have penciled in, one more Electric City Showdown. None of that exists yet. What exists is Friday night at Hanna, with two programs that each know exactly what the other one can do and a little unfinished business between them. One of them keeps playing. The other gets the whole winter to think about it.
We hope to see every Yellow Jacket fan in those home stands this Friday! If you can't make it, follow along on X and Facebook with game updates, and live play-by-play coverage on Exceeding Stats or listen on 94.9 FM. Check back next week for the next Hanna Between the Hashes.