Photo by Rick Nation
Crutches — there were more of them in use on Monday after the already limping Bryant Hornets gathered again for practice after their first loss of the season at Greenwood and in preparation for, perhaps their most important game to date this Friday against Van Buren at Homecoming.
Injuries had already cost the team two key running backs Savonte Turner and Cameron Coleman, the starting middle linebacker Devin Howard and a tight end Zach Kemp. Bryant head coach announced there were new additions to the list in the wake of the trip to Greenwood.
“We lost (linebacker/safety) Philip Isom-Green (knee) for this week, possibly the season,” he said. “We lost (linebacker) Marvin Moody with a knee. I think he checked out okay but he’s probably not going to be cleared to go this week. (End/linebacker) Hayden) Knowles is okay. They checked him for broken rib and a ruptured spleen but he’s good. He was back at practice today.
“I talked to a lot of coaches early in the year and they were all going through it then,” Calley related regarding the rash of injuries. “I talked to Coach (Clint) Ashcraft at Conway and there were other coaches around who suffered from a lot of injuries. I was thinking, thank goodness it’s not happened to us. But it has. It’s come around.
“And we don’t have a lot of depth,” he mentioned. “We’ve got a lot of kids. We don’t have a lot of quality depth that’s Friday-night ready. It puts us in a bind. We’re going to have to have some guys step up and play over their heads in the upcoming weeks if we hope to continue our streak of getting in the playoffs.”
Bryant has reached the playoffs 14 years in a row and 15 of the last 16.
“We’ve been here before,” the Bryant coach acknowledged. “We have faced it before. We’ll get through it somehow, one way or another.”
Van Buren is, in a way, a double conference game for the Hornets, as Bryant is for the Pointers. In each teams’ bid to make the Class 7A State playoffs, only their games against 7A members of the 7A/6A-Central count towards qualifying. That means it comes down to three games and this is one of those.
Asked how he assessed the 38-7 loss to Greenwood after viewing video of the game, Calley said, “I really thought that Greenwood, after watching them on film (prior to Friday’s game) and watching them big-play people to death, I didn’t think we would be as effective on defense as we were. The game plan we had was to not let them beat us throwing the ball and forcing the run, which we did. I didn’t think we’d get many stops but we did. We played much better defensively than I thought we could.”
“The score was not indicative of how well our defense played,” he continued. “The biggest problem was, offensively, we couldn’t generate first downs even after stops. We kept putting our defense back on the field.
“I have to take responsibility for that because the offensive line did not play well,” added Calley, who coaches the o-line. “We had some factors during the week that hurt our preparation but, still, they played, by far, their worst game of the year.”
For his part, defensive coordinator and linebacker coach Steve Griffth insisted that his group didn’t play up to its usual standards, particularly at linebacker.
Calley continued: “Greenwood, there’s no other way to put it, beat us up like a new kid on the playground in elementary school. They just got after us. They had a good game plan. They also had the (Grant) Morgan kid, number 15, and that is a football-playing fool. He was all over the field. We could not block him. He was slipping underneath stuff and making tackles. He was going over the top making tackles and we had no answer for it.”
Calley agreed that Greenwood’s touchdown drive right before the first half ended and to start the second half were back-breaking, turning a 10-7 deficit into a 24-7 hill.
“I wish we could’ve kept the ball,” he said, pointing to two possessions after the Bulldogs had taken the 10-7 lead. “We forced a turnover and we did good things defensively. We just couldn’t move it.
“It hampered us with our backs being hurt,” the coach added. “We didn’t want to run (quarterback) Gunnar (Burks) because we can’t afford to get him banged up. (Running back) DeAmonte (Terry), after the third play from scrimmage, he was limping. He wasn’t himself.”
Yet, he saw some spark in the second half that may benefit the team down the road.
“Offensively, in the second half, we did move the ball in the air, which is positive,” he Calley related. “We had the two big plays in the first half, which Coach (Lance) Parker had rigged up. We felt like we could score on both of them but it took two to get one score instead of two scores.”
Trailing 24-7 in the third quarter, the Hornets put together their most complete drive of the night from their own 29 to the Greenwood 14. But a fourth-down pass fell incomplete and the Bulldogs took over on downs.
“I should’ve kicked a field goal after the initial drive of the third quarter to make it 24-10,” Calley said. “I just felt like we had to have touchdowns to win. Looking back, I wish I would’ve taken that opportunity to give us a little momentum because the ensuing drive by them, we did get a stop. We stopped them, forced them to punt.”
The Bulldogs faced a fourth-and-3 at their own 34. Calley takes it from there:
“They lined up in a punt formation, they shifted — all the linemen are in a two-point stance then they simulated a snap count and they all go down (to three-point). It’s deception. It’s been called on us. We used to do it but we couldn’t get away with it because it’s deception.
“It drew us offsides,” he continued. “They throw the flag. I think it’s going to be against them and they call it on us. So that’s why I called the timeout to talk to the referee, to explain it to him. In the end, after the third time (it was explained) and I got my flag (for unsportsmanlike conduct), they finally agreed that I was right but they weren’t going to change the call.
“I really thought they were going to give me a warning before they gave me the 15-yarder,” he added. “But it didn’t happen that way. I guess they’d had enough. I sure had had enough.”
The Bulldogs took advantage of both penalties and drove for another touchdown to extend the lead to 31-7 with just over a minute left in the third quarter.
“The only chance we had to get back in the game was that stop and forcing them to punt,” Calley stated. “After that, I knew if they scored it was over.
“That’s when I pulled the starters out,” he said. “And all the kids were upset with me but they live in the here and now. They don’t see the big picture. The big picture is, the best thing for the Bryant Hornets is to get out of that game healthy and be ready for Van Buren. And, at that point, I just didn’t see anyway we could climb back in it.”
