Back for its ninth season, the popular Intelligencer/Bucks County Courier Times ‘Let’s Talk Football’ features the ‘Game On’ crew: Drew Markol and Todd Thorpe. To view this week’s show, click on the following link: http://www.theintell.com/videos/hsgameon/ To stay on top of the high school football news in the area, visit the Intelligencer http://www.theintell.com/sports and Bucks County Courier http://www.buckscountycouriertimes.com/sports/high-schoolsweb sites.
Check out this week’s picks by our panel of experts: http://www.suburbanonesports.com/football-forecaster
SuburbanOneSports.com: Your thoughts about what has been a very interesting SOL National Conference.
Drew Markol: “Let’s start with Neshaminy/Council Rock South. That was a game that both teams had to have. We started the weekend with a four-way tie for first between Truman, Council Rock South, Pennsbury and Neshaminy. Each of them had one loss, and Neshaminy – with a nice defensive effort – shuts out Council Rock South 9-0 and gives Council Rock South a second loss in the conference. Neshaminy remains alive for the conference title, and if they beat archrival Pennsbury on Friday, they can knock Pennsbury out of a share of the title and will probably end up sharing it with Truman. If Truman plays well, which they obviously have been doing, they can most likely beat Bensalem, only have the one loss and get a share of the title. On the flip side, Pennsbury had to beat a pretty good Abington team that’s been a little under the radar. Abington gave them a fight in very close game. Pennsbury had to have that game too in order to set up its game against Neshaminy. Now it looks like you’re going to have co-champions with Truman and the winner of Pennsbury/Neshaminy.
“Also, if you look at the district rankings, Truman is fifth, and if they beat Bensalem, hopefully, they’ll stay right around five. You have Neshaminy at 11 and Pennsbury at 12. The loser of that Neshaminy/Pennsbury game is going to drop a few notches, and the winner may move up a spot or two. I’m not sure they’ll move into the top eight and get a home game. It will have more of an effect on the loser. Let’s say Neshaminy wins that game on Friday. Well, Pennsbury at number 12 might now drops down to maybe 13 or 14 with the loss. If you do that, now you’re looking at a first round game against one of the Downingtowns, maybe a Coatesville after a long ride for a game you don’t want to have in the first round. The same goes for Neshaminy. For both teams, there’s a lot of incentive. You have the archrival, and you have a heck of a lot better seeding come the district tournament if you win that game.
“Truman beat Pennridge 48-20 – nice job by them. For Truman, you’re looking at a home playoff game, which is fabulous. That’s just a credit to them. You look at Council Rock South sitting at number 15. They obviously have to beat Council Rock North in order for them to hopefully stay there. Unless a lot of things happen in front of them, they’re probably not going to move up very much. Beating a Council Rock North team that hasn’t won very much, you don’t get a lot of power points. That 9-0 loss to Neshaminy was very costly to South because it pushed them down to where they could be playing a North Penn or Coatesville in the first round. Although, if you’re Council Rock South, you’ve already played North Penn, took them to overtime, so maybe you want to have a shot at them. Playoffs are a different story sometimes too.
“With the National Conference, as we stand right now, with four teams in the tournament, we don’t normally get that. That’s a pretty good effort by them.”
Todd Thorpe: “I was in the National Conference last week – the big game between Neshaminy and Council Rock South. All of a sudden defensive football took over again, and Neshaminy went on to win that game 9-0. It was a great football game defensively. Both teams really buckled down inside the red zone defensively, and that was the story of the game. The real play of the game – and I tell this to everyone I talk to, including the people at Neshaminy – was on fourth-and-goal from the four-yard line trailing 6-0, Council Rock South runs a pass to the big tight end Nick Gallo, and pretty much the only person between him and the goal line was Neshaminy safety Cory Joyce. Joyce made a great tackle to stop him right at the five-yard line to end that drive. A couple possessions later – he comes up with the big interception and return to set up the field goal to make it 9-0 and really salt the game away. They’ve got some very good defensive players on that team. Oleh Manzyk gets a lot of attention, and he deserves it. The secondary is excellent. It’s good to see a game like that every once in a while because you see some of these high scoring games, and it’s kind of crazy. Do I think this week’s game against Pennsbury is going to be high scoring? Probably, but Neshaminy’s defense really showed up.
“For Council Rock South, those were just two heartbreaking losses in a row, and really, the difference between them winning the league title and Truman winning the league title is they lost two nail biters and Truman won two nail biters over the same two teams, Truman and Pennsbury. Now you’re Rock South – three weeks ago, they were on top of the world, but they hadn’t played Pennsbury or Neshaminy yet. So that was always the thing. I still think this is four-team division. I think any one of these four teams could call themselves the best team, and give credit to Truman. They kind of emerged the team to come out of it.
“Truman had a nice win last week against Pennridge. You never know how you’re going to react in that game, but I think they simply have too much athleticism in that matchup. Truman is a very tough matchup as we look into next week and beyond. They’re very interesting. You get the idea that if they played someone physical that they could be manhandled a little bit, but you also get the idea if they played someone physical, is that team going to be quick enough to hang with them? Would it take a team like Coatesville, North Penn or Garnet Valley to be able to match them talent for talent to be able to contain them. It’s a very interesting story. They play Bensalem this week, and they’ll wrap up their share of the title and the league. Good for them – they deserve it. I’m very curious to see how they do in the playoffs. I covered their game at Coatesville last year in the first round of the playoffs. They were a 6-4 team, and I wouldn’t say they were just happy to be there, but it was their first time there ever. They weren’t scared of Coatesville at all. They couldn’t stop Coatesville – don’t get me wrong, they weren’t going to win that game, but they weren’t scared of them. They had no fear, and you could tell that right from the start that they went out to Coatesville and those kids didn’t think anything of it. They thought it was just another opponent we can play and another opponent we can beat. Kids are trained to think like that, but that’s just the way they play. The fact that they found a way to win those close games this year is a testament to the coaching and also the ability to have kids like Javeer Peterson, who can make plays. I had a coach in the National Conference this week tell me that he thinks Javeer Peterson is the best player in the National Conference. You think of Oleh Manzyk and you think of Nick Gallo, and you’re like, ‘Wow, Javeer Peterson is that talented on both sides of the ball and that athletic.’ He’s getting a lot of Division I looks. He’s a kid that really puts them over the top, and they have three running backs that can all kill you. Terrence Rodgers is really good, and Dylan Snelling is a really heady quarterback and a leader. It’s just a very impressive team.
“We’d be remiss not to talk about Abington. What an effort by Tamir Berthau last week – over 200 yards rushing at the quarterback position and he threw for another hundred and change. There’s a team that was pretty much exchanging scores with Pennsbury, especially in the fourth quarter. If one thing goes differently, they might end up on the winning end of that game, and all of a sudden spoil Pennsbury’s big game with Neshaminy this week. Pennsbury has emerged into a very potent offense. I’ve said it before – that offense is a very tough offense to defend. Drew Hensor, their quarterback, has really come on and slowly and surely taken over that team this year. As you look into that game this week with Neshaminy and Pennsbury, flip a coin. You have to like Neshaminy a little bit because they’re home, but Pennsbury is tough and they’re battle tested, and they’ve played all these close games. I picked Pennsbury, but I don’t really have a strong feeling about the winner and loser in this game at all. I just hope it’s as good as all the other games at the top of this division because that’s been a league with just terrific football games every week, and that’s one of the things that stood out.”
SuburbanOneSports.com: Your thoughts about the Continental Conference heading into the final week of the season.
Drew Markol: “You look at the Continental Conference – you have North Penn as probably the top seed. They play William Tennent this week in a game they should win. They’re going to be undefeated and right at the top or near the top. The big game in the Continental is Pennridge at CB East. Pennridge is 4-5, lost to Truman in a non-league game 48-20 last week. Pennridge goes into the game number 18 in the rankings, Ridley is at 17 and CB East is at 16. They play on Saturday, so they should know all the ramifications and all the math. Pennridge needs to beat East. I believe Ridley plays Haverford. They could use a Ridley loss on Friday, and if they beat East, there’s a 5-5 team in Pennridge that gets in and CB East is knocked out. That’s obviously a pretty big game for both teams and looks like an elimination game for both teams. If Pennridge wins, they’re in. If they lose, they’re out. If CB East wins, they’re in. If CB East loses, they’re out. If you get in as a 16 seed, it’s a tough road, but it’s supposed to be. You get the number 16 seed, and you’re obviously not getting a home game at any point. There’s a lot of things that have to happen, a lot of math, a lot of scores that still have to come in from Friday to determine the importance of that Saturday game. It looks like it could be winner in and loser out of districts game. It’s exciting. I’m not a fan of the district tournament. There are too many teams, but they’re not changing it any time soon. It should be an eight-team tournament, but no one has called me up and asked me what I think.
“Nice job by first-year West coach Rob Rowan, whose team beat Souderton. Souderton was a team fighting for a playoff spot, and West had been eliminated. The week before West gave North Penn a game, and it kind of just shows you something that he hasn’t lost his kids. Here’s a West team that lost Luke Benson, one of the top players in the state, not just the SOL. He’s a kid going to Syracuse, and they lost him a couple of weeks ago to injury, and he’s out for the year. That’s nice work by West to knock off Souderton, and it’s a credit to Rob Rowan for keeping those kids together. They could have easily just packed it in, and that would have been that. That was one of the most surprising scores of the week, West beating Souderton 28-21. They scored a couple of late touchdowns because Souderton had a lead on them, which makes it even more impressive because West could have said, ‘We’re done,’ and that didn’t happen. A tip of the hat to them for hanging in there, a credit to first-year coach Rob Rowan.”
Todd Thorpe: “Somehow, that Pennridge/CB East game is probably for the 16th and final spot in the playoffs. Ridley is in the mix, and there’s a couple of other scenarios that could happen, but it comes down to that game. It also earns the winner a shot to go to Lansdale next week to play North Penn, but hey, you’ve got to get there first. That’s a really interesting game too. At times, CB East looks like a team that is a really potent playoff type offensive football team. Can they do it against Pennridge? Pennridge might not be the same type of team as CB East, but they’ve been up and down too. They’ve had some good wins, and they’ve had some losses. It’s an interesting matchup. I do like CB East to win that game, but I don’t think by much. It will be interesting. With Souderton slipping last week against CB West, that conference comes down to a two-playoff conference, and it might be the one and the 16 seeds. It’s interesting from that perspective.
“North Penn has William Tennent this week. I don’t think we’re really going to know where North Penn is until we see them against a playoff caliber team. If they’re in the district quarterfinals in a couple of weeks, I think that’s when we’ll find out – is North Penn really the best team in the district or are they the team that’s kind of struggled? They’re going to have to be tested, and I think they will. I think they may respond. I think they’re doing some things right over there. We’ll just find out. I definitely don’t think this week’s game is going to be a tough game for them.”
SuburbanOneSports.com: Your thoughts about the American Conference.
Todd Thorpe: “In the American Conference, Upper Dublin is getting ready for the 5A playoffs, and that’s big for them. Like I said last week, they’re a contender in 5A. They’re playing Upper Moreland, and it’s kind of a rebuilding year for Upper Moreland at 3-5. They dropped down from 5A to 4A. I think if they’d had one of those seasons like they had last year, that’s a team that could be competing for the 4A district title. They’re rebuilding a little bit. Caleb Mead has just had a terrific year. You can’t wait to see them on Thanksgiving against Hatboro-Horsham in a game that means a lot to those communities. They played earlier in the season, so it’s a rematch and that’s kind of a downer.
“Quakertown plays Kennett this week in the non-league game that they scheduled hastily at the end of the year, and they need to win. They’re sitting at 10 in the district. All of a sudden, when you look at the matchups – if Quakertown gets the right matchup, they could be a real threat in that first round. So they want to be playing their best ball, and I think they probably will be.”
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