Recap
Hanna had not played a road game since September 4. By the time the Jackets finally made the trip to Greenwood, the regular season was down to its last three Fridays and the region race had narrowed to a path you could trace with one finger. The opponent at the end of the drive was about as familiar as it gets. Greenwood and Westside are the two programs Hanna has played more than any other, so this one came with plenty of history attached, and it still unfolded like very few games in that history ever have.
Greenwood’s night went sideways almost immediately. The Eagles lost 15 yards on their opening possession, tried a fake punt to get some of it back, and turned the ball over on their own 20. Their second drive also ended in a turnover on downs, and both times the Jackets answered with a touchdown drive. With just under four minutes left in the first quarter, Hanna led 14-0 and Greenwood was still sitting on negative total yardage.
The rest of the half belonged to the defenses. Greenwood’s offense went punt, punt, and then ran out of half. The Eagle defense settled in too, holding Hanna to 64 total yards in the second quarter. The 14-0 lead the Jackets had built before the first quarter was the same lead they carried into halftime.
If the first half ended in a whimper, the second half started at full speed. Greenwood kicked off to open the third quarter, Caden Morrell took it back 90 yards for a touchdown, and seconds into the half the lead was 21. That was only the first wave. On Greenwood’s next possession, Connor Ash chased down the quarterback and forced a fumble that Carson Cole recovered. Two plays and 11 yards later it was 28-0, barely two minutes into the third quarter.
And the Jackets weren’t finished. Corban Lack added a 32-yard field goal, and Darrius Hanna ended the quarter with a 24-yard interception return for a touchdown, the last points anyone would score in the night. Hanna put up 24 points in the third quarter alone and took a 38-0 lead into the fourth, which turned out to be mostly a formality. The main activity came from the officials’ flags, including a few personal fouls, with the two teams combining for five penalties and 75 yards.
So Hanna headed home to Anderson County at 7-1 with a perfect region record, and the win was the 70th for Coach Tone as the Yellow Jackets’ head coach, moving him to 70-16 at Hanna. With two regular-season games left, a region championship is close enough to see. It is not close enough to touch yet, and the next two weeks will decide whether the Jackets get there.
Easley Preview
Hanna stays on the road this week with a trip to Easley, and the series runs deeper than most people would guess. Friday will be the 50th meeting between the Jackets and the Green Wave with only Westside and Greenwood having shown up on Hanna’s schedule more often. Hanna leads this series 29-20 and has won the last eight coming into Friday night.
Easley comes in at 1-7 overall and 0-3 in region play. The lone win came in the third game of the season, a 36-35 decision over Riverside. The losses have come against Pickens (61-41), Pendleton (45-42), Palmetto (49-27), Eastside (48-19), Greenwood (42-14), Westside (55-3), and Laurens (64-20). Put those together and you get a team averaging a little over 25 points a game while allowing just under 50, and the first of those numbers is the one that deserves Hanna’s attention. A team that scores 42 on Pendleton and 41 on Pickens in losses has no trouble moving the ball. Easley’s problem has been stopping people, and an offense like that can put a scare into anybody who hands it a few extra possessions.
The center of that offense is sophomore quarterback Whitley Rodgers, who, to my eye, brings the strongest arm Hanna will have seen all season. He has thrown for 1,969 yards and 17 touchdowns, his yardage ranking 10th in South Carolina across all classifications, according to the MaxPreps state stat leaders (and 4th among 4A passers). Where Hanna’s offense comes at you with a stable of running backs, Easley spreads the ball across a stable of receivers, five of them with at least 200 yards. Chase Wimpey leads the way with 33 catches for 615 yards and 10 touchdowns. Behind him are Maddox Raby (28 for 356), Leyton Scott (17 for 335 and three scores), Owen Ross (23 for 300 and a touchdown), and Brady Williams (20 for 202 and two touchdowns). That depth is its own kind of problem, because there is no single player a defense can take away and call it a night.
The biggest danger this week, though, is mindset, and it comes from two directions. The first is the record. A 1-7 team hosting a 7-1 team is one of the oldest setups in football. The better team shows up a little flat, the other team plays loose with nothing to lose, and somebody rides home wondering how it got away from them.
The second direction is next week. Hanna closes the regular season against Westside in the Electric City Showdown, and with the Jackets’ biggest rival sitting at No. 1 in 4A. That game has been circled across the state since the start of the season. It would be easy for a locker room full of teenagers to let their attention drift a week ahead. Honestly, forget the players. Most of us in the stands looked past this one a long time ago. But football has never cared much about what anybody looked past, and the better team does not always win. If Hanna stumbles this week, next week means a whole lot less, to say nothing of what it would do to playoff seeding.
Here’s the thing, though. This team has spent the entire season showing that once the ball is kicked off, it plays the opponent in front of it, and I have no doubt Hanna does that again this week. And if they do, just wait to see what next week holds.
None of this requires Hanna to be perfect at Easley. It requires the Jackets to be professional, to keep a dangerous passing game from turning the night into a shootout while the offense goes about its usual business on the ground. Do that, and the conversation everybody wants to have about Westside can wait the extra week it deserves.
Friday Formula
The Starting Eight
Coaches love to talk about the middle eight, the four minutes on either side of halftime that can swing a game. Watching Hanna this season, I’ve become more interested in what I’ve started calling the starting eight, the first four minutes of the first and third quarters, because that’s where this team does some of its best work. Hanna has outscored opponents 52-20 in those opening minutes of each half this season and has lost the starting eight only once, 7-0 against BHP. At Greenwood, the Jackets scored 21 unanswered points in that window, more than half of the night’s total, before the game had really gotten settled.
Against Easley, those eight minutes matter even more than usual. An offense built to score the way Easley’s does gets more dangerous when it’s playing from even or ahead and can call whatever it wants. Score early and Easley has to chase. Come out of halftime and score fast, and the chase gets longer and more desperate. The work Hanna does in those two short windows tends to pay off long after the clock has moved past them.
Nameless Faceless
We touched on this in the preview, but it deserves its own space. With Westside waiting on the other side of this week, Hanna needs to treat Easley as a nameless and faceless opponent. On paper the Jackets are the better team, and the best thing they can do with that information is ignore it. This group has set a standard on both sides of the ball, and that standard is not to rise or fall depending on who lines up across from it. Playing down to a 1-7 record is how upsets start, and saving your best for the No. 1 team in 4A is how you show up to that game having already left something behind. Yes, this looks one-sided on paper. The point of this week is to prove Hanna can play like Hanna no matter who is in front of them.
Put the two criteria together and the formula for this week is simpler than everything swirling around it. Win the opening minutes of each half, keep the focus on the team in the other jerseys, and let the rest of the noise wait. Westside isn’t going anywhere. The Electric City Showdown will be there next week, which is exactly when Hanna should start thinking about it.
Statistically Speaking
Last week, Zy West, Connor Ash, and Greg Tatum lived in Greenwood’s backfield, and it made me curious about what a single negative play actually does to a drive, both for Hanna and for the teams Hanna plays. The answer turned out to be a lot.
When Hanna gets through a drive without losing yardage on a single snap, the offense has been about as dependable as you could ask for. The Jackets have had 47 of those clean drives this season and turned 28 of them into touchdowns, right around 60 percent. Add just one negative play and the picture changes completely. In 29 drives with at least one loss of yardage, Hanna has reached the end zone seven times, or 24.1 percent.
That gap makes sense once you think about how Hanna wins. This offense leans on its stable of running backs and wants to live in manageable down-and-distance situations, where the playbook stays open and the defense has to respect everything. A tackle for loss takes that away. Second-and-long and third-and-long shrink the menu, give a defense permission to get aggressive, and ask an offense built on steady gains to suddenly produce a big one. A touchdown rate cut by more than half is not hard to explain when a team that wants to stay on schedule gets knocked off it.
Flip it around and the same rule holds, with Hanna on the right side of it. Opponents have put together 40 drives against the Jackets without a negative play, and only 12 of them ended in touchdowns, or 30 percent. That’s the number that stands out most to me, because it means that even when an offense stays on schedule against this defense, it usually still comes up empty. Once Hanna’s defense creates a single negative play, the touchdown rate drops to 13.5 percent, five touchdown drives in 37 tries. The defense doesn’t need a tackle for loss to win a possession, but when it gets one, the door nearly closes.
Bring that to this week and the case makes itself. Easley’s quarterback can find any of five receivers if he has time, and negative plays are how a defense takes that time away. If West, Ash, Tatum, and the rest of the front find their way into the backfield again, Hanna’s own numbers say Easley’s drives get a lot shorter.
Season Quick Stats
Hanna has 11 rushers with 10 or more carries this season, and five of them are averaging 6 or more yards per carry.
Sixteen different players have carried the ball for Hanna this season.
Hanna averages 29 minutes, 28 seconds of possession per game.
Hanna has converted 49.5 percent of its third downs, while opponents have converted just 29.4 percent.
Corban Lack has 42 kickoffs at an average of 58.5 yards, with 30 touchbacks.
Hanna has played seven teams 30 or more times in program history, and six of them are on this year’s schedule. Hillcrest is the only one Hanna won’t see.
Hanna has allowed only four second-half touchdowns all season.
Wrap-Up
Greenwood was the kind of night that makes a fan base a little greedy. The Jackets owned the opening minutes, got through a quieter second quarter without giving an inch, and then turned the start of the third into the kind of avalanche that ends a game before anyone needs to check the clock. It was also the kind of night that can make the following week feel like a formality, and that’s the trap waiting in Easley.
Next week will get all the attention it deserves, and probably a little more. This week is the one that decides how much next week is worth. If Hanna handles Easley the way it has handled the opponent in front of it all season, the Electric City Showdown becomes everything people have been saying it would be since the start of the season. If not, it becomes something smaller. I’d bet on the first one.