For about forty-six minutes Friday night, it did not feel like a win for the Yellow Jackets.
It is amazing what 1.7 seconds, 24 yards, and a foot swinging through a football can do to a whole fanbase. The Yellow Jackets sit 1-0, and the record book does not know the difference between that and a blowout.
We hear a lot about a game of halves, whether what happens early carries over or evaporates. Friday was a game of three quarters and how the whole thing tilted in the fourth. Of Hanna's 208 rushing yards, 101 came in that final quarter. That is not an accident, and it is not luck. That is how this team is built.
Hanna makes you decide whether you are willing to go into deep physical water. Then they make you go there whether you want to or not. Play after play, the Jackets stack punishment, inch by inch, dragging BHP, or whoever the opponent is, somewhere they do not want to be. You could feel it building even when the scoreboard refused to reward it. And nothing spoke to that louder than the last drive.
With just over two minutes left, Hanna marches 43 yards on six plays. And the two snaps right before the final kick? Brock Cole rumbled up the middle for 10 and then 12, the second one moving the chains. Those were not some specialty called runs. Those were the interest payments on 47 minutes of pounding.
Was the offense clean? No. From the cheap seats it left plenty to be desired, and I'd bet the coaching staff would tell you the same in a quieter room. ut there is a trait that shows up in exactly one stat we bother to keep, the one in the win column, and that is a team's willingness to find a way. Not to accept a result that feels inevitable, but to push and strain through a rough night and end up in precisely the right spot with a chance to win it. Most coaches will take that quality over almost any other, and it is a lot better to be the team that squeaked a win out than the team wishing it had one more possession after a loss.
The defense was the actual headliner
We just spent a few hundred words on the offense, and the offense put the points on the board and won the game. But the defense won the night.
The aggregate looks ordinary. Dig in and it stops looking ordinary in a hurry. Hanna gave up 251 total yards, 220 through the air and 31 on the ground. Here is where it gets interesting. Four of those completions went to Malachi Bohler for 162 yards, which is 73.7% of BHP's passing output landing in one set of hands. His two touchdowns covered 55 and 78 yards, 133 in two snaps. I will not pretend to know coverages or assignments, but if I had to guess, both of those scores came off broken plays rather than anything BHP schemed. Every play counts and every point is real, and I am not waving those away. Still, take two to four snaps out of the night and you are staring at a smothering defensive stat line, one anchored by holding BHP to 31 rushing yards on 25 carries. This is a program that has averaged better than 250 rushing yards a game over the last three years. Holding that offense to 31 is a monumental feat.
It started with the big man in the middle. Zy West finished with 10 tackles, two for loss, a sack, a forced fumble, and four quarterback hurries. That is a monster night from a spot that often gets asked to do the thankless work, occupy blockers and clog space so everyone else can run free. West did the dirty job and stuffed the box score anyway. Around him, Connor Ash added eight tackles and two behind the line, Darius Hanna piled up nine tackles, and Carson Cole chipped in seven tackles with a tackle for loss on top. That is a defense doing damage at every level.
The kicker with the train horn in his ear
And we cannot close the book on Friday without mentioning Corban Lack. Ice water in the veins, yes, but there is real power in that leg too. He drilled the game-winner while the opposing crowd screamed and a train horn blared, and long before that he was quietly flipping the field every time the offense stalled. He averaged 41.6 yards per punt with three inside the 20, and his three kickoffs averaged 55 yards with a touchback on a 65-yard boot. Last week's preview leaned into Hanna's return game. Turns out an stone-cold kicker can leave his fingerprints all over a night just as loudly.
Up next: a trip to Powdersville
One in the bank, and now the road bends toward the Patriots.
One in the books and in the right column, and now a new problem walks through the door. Hanna stays inside Anderson County but heads to Powdersville to face the Patriots, who are coming off a serious 2025. They went 11-3 and reached the Upper State championship game before falling 35-7 to BHP, and they opened this year with a 28-12 win over Seneca.
Powdersville is built on lines of scrimmage and quick, shifty skill players, and this season is no exception. Xavier Huggins and Nasir Waldrop give the Patriots explosive balance from the backfield out to the perimeter. Huggins earned 3A All-State honors last season with 16 touchdowns and 1,552 all-purpose yards. Waldrop was every bit as productive, finishing with 16 total scores, 1,072 rushing yards, and 279 through the air. The player who may cause the most trouble, though, is tight end Riggs Savage, a 6-6, 235-pound junior who already holds a stack of Division I offers and sits as the number one tight end and number four overall prospect in South Carolina for his class in the 247Sports rankings. Like Nick Sargent for BHP last week, Savage is a true dual threat. He has the size to block defensive ends and set an edge on outside runs, and the polish to run a real route tree whether he lines up with his hand in the dirt or splits out wide to bully a smaller defender. The scarier wrinkle is what happens when Powdersville turns him loose as a lead blocker on a quick screen to Huggins. Savage is powerful and agile enough to spring the block, and Huggins is fast enough to take it the distance behind him. Fold in a sharp screen game out of the backfield and defending the whole field becomes a genuine chore.
Running the offense will be Dashton Brown, making just his second career start after four-year starter Keigan Reid graduated. Brown can hurt you with his legs and turn a small crease into a chunk gain, so Hanna cannot lose track of him. Do not be shocked, either, to see Waldrop or Huggins take a wildcat snap and change the math for a play.
Defensively, Powdersville lives in the front seven, and the linebackers are the calling card, led by Jayden Wertz, 2025 region defensive player of the year.. The style is pressure and havoc, though it isn't just teeing off and blitzing every down. They're multiple, sliding from even fronts to odd, stunting and twisting across the line, filling run gaps, keeping an offense guessing about where the next problem comes from. That active front is built to disrupt a run game, which means it's built to disrupt exactly what Hanna wants to do. Pressure like this creates turnovers, and turnovers have been a Patriots trademark under Coach Mustar. Hanna will need to trust assignments and take care of the ball this Friday.
Three things that keep the Jackets unbeaten
Connected defense. It starts up front. Whoever takes the first snap for Powdersville is making his second varsity start, and Hanna has to make an inexperienced passer uncomfortable. If the rush arrives, the defensive backs can trust it and lock onto those playmakers running routes.
Start faster. It took nearly three and a half quarters for the offense to find a gear Friday. A quick start flips this from a grind into a big night.
Cut the mistakes. Ten penalties for 80 yards last week is a number that shrinks as young players get reps. Fewer flags, fewer missed assignments, fewer lapses in the split-second decisions football demands. The team that lined up against BHP is already not the team lining up this week. That's how this works, practice to practice, Friday to Friday, youth becomes experience.
Statistically Speaking
Every week we will use this space to chase a stat or two down a rabbit hole, something a little more obscure or a little more specific to that Friday. This week, first impressions.
Hanna and Powdersville have never met, which is not a surprise given Powdersville only opened its doors in 2012. That got me wondering how Hanna has historically fared the first time it sees a new opponent. The answer is very well. Hanna is 35-9-1 in first recorded regular-season meetings, a 78.9 percent clip, and 17-5-1 on the road in those debuts. The recent history is even friendlier. Since 2000, the Jackets are 8-1 against brand-new regular-season opponents, the lone blemish a 2000 loss to Lexington. Across those nine games Hanna has averaged 32.9 points scored and 13.3 allowed, and has hit 40 or more points six times.
It will be exciting to see how this week’s first impression is made at Powdersville.
Most weeks we stop at one rabbit hole. This week, one more, because it's too good to sit on. Under Coach Tone, Hanna is 49-1 when it allows 24 or fewer points in a game. Read that again. The only loss came to Gafney 21-7 in the second round playoff game of the 2024 season. Keep the other team under 24, and across this era Hanna has lost exactly one time.
Which loops all the way back to a defense that looks to be leading the way.
Closing
Being 1-0 heading into Week 2 is better than the alternative. That part's obvious. The better part, the part that should have you circling Friday, is walking in knowing Hanna’s best football is still ahead of them.
Hanna did not play to its ceiling against BHP. What it did was find a win the way this program has always found them, in the deep water, one punishing yard at a time, with an stone-cold kicker waiting at the end. Now the road heads to Powdersville, where a good, dangerous, well-coached team is waiting with All-State players and a tight end half the country wants. It's a real test, the kind that tells you something true about a team still figuring out who it is.
The team that starts Friday won't be the one that started against BHP. That's the fun of early season matchups; games full of question marks. We get to watch the answers show up in real time, starting in Powdersville Fridany Night.
We hope to see every Yellow Jacket fan at Powdersville. If you can't make it, follow along on X and Facebook, with live stat updates on Exceeding Stats. Check back next week for the next Hanna Between the Hashes.