Recap
Let’s not pretend. Nobody came here for a deep dive on a 69-3 win over Easley, and the Jackets made sure there wasn’t much to dive into anyway. Hanna scored early, kept scoring, and walked out 8-1 overall and 4-0 in Region 2 AAAA, which was the whole assignment. The Jackets took care of business the way a good team should in a week like that, put the win in the bank and turned the page, because the next one is the game everybody has been waiting on all season.
Westside Preview
Well, Jacket fans, here it is. The Electric City Showdown puts the two largest schools in Anderson County on the same field, the only two from the City of Anderson, and this year the No. 1 Westside Rams are coming across town to play the No. 5 T.L. Hanna Yellow Jackets with the Region 2 AAAA championship going home with the winner. Historical weekly rankings are hard to come by, so I can’t prove this is the biggest version of this game ever played. I just can’t picture one bigger.
The roads here barely differ. Hanna is 8-1 overall and 4-0 in the region, and Westside is sitting on the exact same marks. The Rams opened with a 39-14 win over Ashley Ridge, took their only loss the following week in a 55-20 game against Jefferson out of Georgia, and they haven’t lost since. The seven-game run that followed went through Mauldin (41-24), Hillcrest (34-24), Murphy NC (21-7), Laurens (23-14), Easley (55-3), Fountain Inn (56-42) and, last Friday, Greenwood (41-8). The outlier is that Fountain Inn game, where the Rams gave up 42 and still won by two touchdowns, which is either encouraging or terrifying depending on which side of town you live on.
Then there’s the roster, and everyone starts in the same place. Bear Woods is a sophomore quarterback and the younger brother of former Westside passer Cutter Woods, who is now at the University of South Carolina. Bear threw for 2,318 yards as a freshman, completing 58 percent of his passes with 22 touchdowns and six interceptions, and the jump since then is exactly the kind you’d sketch out if you were drawing it up. Through nine games this season he has 1,763 yards, a 60.5 percent completion rate, 27 touchdowns and only four interceptions. The yardage hasn’t caught last season’s total yet, but the touchdowns already sit five past it and the interceptions are down, with a regular-season game still to play.
What makes Woods so hard to plan for is who he’s throwing to. Tajeh Watson, a senior, transferred in from BHP this season after an 1,100-yard, 11-touchdown year with the Bears, and between the two schools he has passed 2,500 career receiving yards with 34 receiving touchdowns. He is committed to Virginia and ranked the No. 19 prospect in South Carolina in his class, and receiver might only be his second-best position, which we’ll get to on the other side of the ball. Lined up opposite him is Jae White, a sophomore ranked No. 2 in the state in his class by 247Sports. Across last season and this one, White has 66 catches for 1,116 yards and 14 touchdowns, almost 17 yards a catch. He has the same top gear as Watson, but he plays receiver with a running back’s appetite for contact after the catch, a Deebo Samuel sort of problem for whoever is assigned to bring him down.
The part that makes this offense so tough to defend is that taking away the two headliners doesn’t end the conversation. Elijah Lipsey and Kam Mattison have combined for 37 catches, 480 yards and six touchdowns, and they’re the ones waiting in whatever space a defense leaves when it rolls everything toward Watson and White.
I realize I’m starting to sound like a late-night infomercial, but stay on the line, because there’s more. Westside’s reputation is built on the passing game, yet the Rams are at their most dangerous when the run game is rolling alongside it. Damauri Robinson leads that group with 675 yards and six touchdowns on 98 carries, close to seven yards a carry, and BJ Anderson, another BHP transfer who saw limited work early in the season, has added 354 yards and four touchdowns on 74 carries. When those two are moving the chains on the ground, a defense has to choose between helping against the run and helping against two of the best receivers in the state, and nobody enjoys making that choice.
All of it runs behind the biggest offensive line Hanna will see this season. Westside’s Hudl roster lists starting tackle Jayden Fountain at 6-foot-5 and 305 pounds and guard Joshua Brown at 6-foot-2 and 375. Cedric Hagood, at the other tackle spot, has no height or weight listed at all, and I’d still put him as the biggest of the three. Put a mountain range up front, let the skill players run through it as smooth as a mountain stream, and you have one of the most dangerous offenses in any classification in South Carolina.
Defensively, the highest-rated player on the roster is junior Christian Webb-Scott, ranked the No. 1 player in South Carolina in his class and invited to the Under Armour Next All-Star Game on January 3, 2027, in Orlando. The size is what you notice first, 6-foot-6 and 250 pounds, the frame national recruiters go looking for. The play is what stays with you. He is fast out of his stance at defensive end, he sheds blocks in a way I haven’t seen at this level, and he has the bend to get under a tackle and turn the corner without losing speed. Westside lines up mostly in an even four-man front, but because of what he can do, the Rams will morph into a 3-4 look that lets him rush from a wider alignment or drop into coverage, which keeps an offense guessing where he’ll be before it can worry about what he’ll do. His season line reads 54 total tackles, 16 tackles for loss and nine sacks, and for a team that leans on the run the way Hanna does, those tackles for loss might be the number that matters most. Losing yardage on first down is how a run-first offense ends up in third-and-long, and third-and-long is exactly where a pass rusher like that wants you.
Then there’s Watson again, this time at cornerback, which I believe is his best and most natural position. As a freshman at BHP he led the team with seven interceptions, and his career total sits at 11, a number that stopped climbing mostly because teams stopped throwing his way.
The talent doesn’t thin out much behind those two, either. Defensive tackle Jeremiah Murphy plays beside Webb-Scott and has 27 total tackles and five tackles for loss of his own, while linebackers Malachi Peterson, who runs the middle, and Jaden Coe have combined for 85 tackles.
And yet, for all the stars on the other sideline, these two teams look remarkably alike once the numbers come out. Both are 8-1, and each team’s opponents have combined for a 34-47 record, so neither side gets to claim it took the harder road. Westside carries the reputation as the explosive offense, but Hanna has actually gained 38 more yards this season, 3,164 to 3,126. Westside has scored 22 more points, 330 to Hanna’s 308, while Hanna has allowed 72 fewer, 119 to 191, which puts Hanna’s scoring margin at plus-189 against Westside’s plus-139. The Rams have scored 30 or more in six games to Hanna’s five, and Hanna has held opponents to 14 or fewer six times to Westside’s five.
The cleanest comparison comes from the five opponents both teams played, Mauldin, Laurens, Easley, Fountain Inn and Greenwood. Against that identical slate, Hanna scored 219 points and Westside scored 216, which is about as close to a tie as football gets. The defensive side is where the gap opens. Hanna allowed 50 points in those five games and Westside allowed 91, which works out to 10 points a game for the Jackets and a little more than 18 for the Rams.
So the Westside picture holds two truths that don’t cancel each other out. The Rams have the names that show up on recruiting sites and an offense built to win a track meet. Hanna has matched that offense yard for yard over the season and point for point against the same opponents, while giving up far less. One side has the star power. The other has spent nine weeks proving star power isn’t the only way to get to 8-1, and Friday is where we find out which version of this season was telling the truth.
Friday Formula
Friday is the biggest test Hanna will face this season, and I’m not exactly climbing out on a limb saying so. Even with everything Westside brings, these teams line up about as evenly as a No. 1 and a No. 5 have any right to, and four things will decide whether the Jackets come out on the right side of it.
Play the Team, Not the Players
I’ve spent a lot of words on Westside’s individual talent, and there’s a version of this week where all those names do the work before the opening kickoff. Some teams look at a roster like that, decide the mountain is too tall, and lose the game in their heads on Tuesday. The best thing about football is that it refuses to be played that way. Nobody runs a route against a recruiting ranking, and every snap Friday will still be eleven against eleven. That suits this Hanna team, which has spent the season playing above the sum of its parts. There are real stars on this Hanna roster and they make their share of plays, but what I keep coming back to is how often the big play comes from the player you least expected, and how unselfishly this group goes about it. I’ve watched a lot of teams, and very few have played that way as consistently as this one. That’s how Hanna has to approach Friday, treating Westside as one team to beat rather than a list of names to fear, and trusting the machine it has spent nine weeks building. Give me the team every time.
Penalties
The flags are the one trend going the wrong direction right now. Through the first seven games, Hanna averaged just over seven penalties a game for 55.1 yards. Over the last two, that has climbed to 11.5 penalties and 127.5 yards a game, more than double the yardage, and those two games alone account for nearly 40 percent of the team’s penalty yardage on the season. It’s a cliché because it keeps being true that penalties tend to decide close games between evenly matched teams, and this one fits that description in every column of the stat sheet. Against an offense with this many ways to score, a flag that keeps a Westside drive alive or hands the Rams a short field isn’t an inconvenience. It’s probably seven points. Late Friday night I’ll be checking the penalty column, and I expect the team that shows up in it less often will also be the team that won.
Special Teams
Of the three phases, special teams is where Hanna holds its biggest edge on paper, and it starts with Corban Lack. He is 31 for 31 on extra points and 7 of 11 on field goals, and 35 of his 50 kickoffs have gone for touchbacks. On the 15 that didn’t, he’s still averaging 57.5 yards a kick, and between the touchbacks and a coverage unit that runs down on everything left in play, Hanna has done a masterful job of giving opponents nothing to work with. Westside’s kicking numbers are more modest, with the Rams converting 32 of 37 extra points, and they’ve gotten creative on fourth down, where Woods will sometimes pooch-punt it himself when the field in front of him is short.
The return game is where Hanna has quietly been winning field position all season, the hidden yardage that never shows up in the offensive totals. Through nine games, opponents kicked off to Hanna 28 times. Three went for touchbacks and one went out of bounds, which left 24 returns, and 20 of those carried past the 20-yard line, the spot Hanna would have gotten for free on a touchback. Hanna’s average starting position after kickoffs is its own 39, which is 19 yards better than a touchback and nearly two first downs gained without a single offensive snap. In a game this tight, opening drives near midfield instead of deep in your own end is the kind of edge that turns a punt into a field goal try.
The flip side is that Westside may have the best return pair in any classification, with Watson and White both capable of taking a kick back at any moment. Keeping the ball away from them with touchbacks, and swarming them when it does come their way, might be the quietest key to the whole night.
Dictate Your Game
Against a team like Westside, the first question everybody asks is how anybody keeps up, and that’s the wrong question. Like a run-and-gun basketball team, the Rams are most comfortable in motion, trading baskets at a pace that suits them. They get uncomfortable when the yards stop coming easily, when drives get taken away, when half a quarter disappears and they haven’t touched the ball. Hanna is built to create that kind of night. Running the ball at a high rate doesn’t guarantee it on its own. What Hanna does that most teams can’t is wear a defense down physically from the first series to the last, and Friday it has to dictate the physicality of the game right along with the tempo. Every time a Westside route gets knocked off its timing, every time the Hanna pass rush gets home, every time the Jackets convert a third-and-medium, the game tilts a little further toward the home side. That’s not something a team can really practice for, and the extra gear Hanna has found these last few weeks has come, at least in part, from turning the physicality all the way up.
If this turns into a basketball game on grass, with the Jackets trading possessions instead of imposing their will, it’ll be a long night. But if Connor Ash, Carson Cole and Greg Tatum are laying lumber in the backfield, if Demarcus Duck is walking over linebackers, and if the Hanna offense stays on the field on fourth down and converts because the line moved people where they didn’t want to go, well, we’ve seen how that movie ends before. I expect Hanna to come out Friday as physical as it has been all season, and the win will follow.
Put the four keys side by side and they all point at the same picture, a clean game on the flag front, a field position edge built by the kicking and return units, and a fourth quarter played at Hanna’s pace with Hanna’s physicality, all of it aimed at keeping a team full of stars from ever getting comfortable. None of that asks Hanna to become something it isn’t. It asks Hanna to be exactly what it has been for nine weeks, against the best team it has seen, with a region championship sitting on the table. That’s a big ask. It’s also one this team has answered almost every week this fall.
Statistically Speaking
This week the numbers belong to the rivalry, and there are plenty of them. Friday marks the 55th straight season these two have played, a streak that runs unbroken back to 1972. With 68 meetings already in the books, Hanna leads the series 47-21 and has won six of the last 10.
For two schools this close together, the games have rarely been close. Only 16 of the 68 have been decided by seven points or fewer, 23.5 percent, and just six have come down to three points or less. Hanna is 10-6 in those one-score games, a 62.5 percent clip that’s actually lower than its winning percentage in the series overall, so the tight ones have played much more like a coin flip than the record would suggest. Meanwhile, exactly half of the meetings, 34 of them, were decided by 15 or more, with another 18 landing between eight and 14 points. When this rivalry tips, it tends to tip hard.
That’s the backdrop for the Jason Tone era, which has been about as even as a rivalry gets. Since Tone took over in 2019, Hanna is 4-3 against Westside, and the scoring across those seven games is 197 for Hanna and 198 for the Rams. Seven games, one point. Two of the three came against Westside teams that went on and played for a 4A state championship.
The number I’d keep in mind this week is 21. All-time, when Hanna holds Westside to 21 points or fewer, Hanna is 45-5. When Westside scores more than 21, the Rams are 16-2. Only seven of the 68 meetings have gone against that line. Under Tone it sits in nearly the same spot and has been even sharper, with Hanna 4-0 when it holds Westside to 21 or fewer and 0-3 when the Rams reach more than 21. That’s where Friday gets interesting, because Hanna has allowed just 13.2 points a game this season and Westside is averaging 36.7. One of those numbers is going to bend, and the whole history of this series says the side of 21 it lands on will decide who walks off with the region title.
The setting carries its own history. Westside used to close Hanna’s regular season every single year, 22 straight from 1996 through 2017, and this year the Rams are back in that final slot with more riding on it than usual. The two have met 36 times as region opponents, with Hanna going 25-11. In region games at Hanna, the Jackets are 12-6, and when the game is a region matchup, at Hanna and the regular-season finale all at once, as it is Friday, Hanna is 9-4.
One number cuts the other way, and it’s worth being honest about. Hanna has lost its last three home regular-season finales against Westside, in 2012, 2014 and 2016, by a combined 98-7. All three came before Coach Tone took over, which means Friday is the first time one of his Hanna teams has hosted the Rams in the last game of the regular season. Whatever that stretch said about those years, this one gets to write its own ending.
Wrap-Up
For one week every fall, Anderson picks a side. It has been doing that since long before anyone in either locker room was born, two schools sharing one city and settling the same argument every year, and in all that time the Electric City Showdown has rarely arrived with this much hanging on it. From across town comes a Westside team that has carried the weight of the #1 ranking, built on the kind of talent college coaches spend their autumns chasing. Waiting at home is a Hanna team that has spent that same fall stacking up wins without asking for much of the spotlight, and now finds itself standing in the exact same place, with the exact same record, one step from the same crown. The region title sits in the middle of the table, and the bragging rights in this town go right along with it. This week, the biggest high school football game in South Carolina may well be the one being played right here in Anderson.
Friday is the night the whole season has been leaning toward. Westside wants a track meet, all space and speed and points piling up in a hurry. Hanna wants something closer to a fight in a phone booth, heavy and patient, where every yard costs something and the final minutes belong to whoever is still standing up straight. One of those styles is going to give, and when it does, one side of Anderson takes the championship home and the other spends a full year hearing about it. Ring the bell. I’m taking the Jackets.
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.