By Craig Dunn
Logan Daily News Sports Editor

LOGAN — Most people in the United States set their clocks back one hour last weekend.

Not the Logan Chieftains. They moved theirs ahead three weeks.

“Obviously, this is the toughest game we will have played all year,” said Logan coach Dale Amyx. “We’ve told the kids ‘this is your state finals game.’ “
The reason for Amyx’s words to his team is because many football pundits have made the Louisville Leopards, the Chiefs’ Region 7 playoff foe this Friday, the favorites to win the state Division II championship three weeks from Friday in Massillon.

There are only four state playoff matchups of undefeated teams this weekend — and Zanesville High School’s Sulsberger Stadium hosts one of them Friday (7:30 p.m. kickoff) when the Chieftains (11-0) and Leopards (11-0) meet for the very first time in a regional semifinal.

“A lot of people had (Louisville) penciled in a long time ago that they would be back in the state finals again,” Amyx said. “A lot of people had (Columbus St. Francis) DeSales in there, too. So we flew under the radar in that aspect.”

That’s mainly because the Chieftains were unfortunate enough to have to share Region 7 playoff residency with two of the toughest Division II teams in the state — and if you believe the pollsters, the two toughest Division II teams in the state.

While the Chiefs enjoyed a No. 5 finish in the final state Associated Press football poll, DeSales and Louisville were ranked first and second, respectively.

Logan would have been the top playoff seed in 21 of the state’s 24 regions and would have finished second in two of the other three. The lone exception? Division II, Region 7.

Thus, the third-seeded Chiefs will be wearing white uniforms and will be the visiting team Friday night against the second-seeded Leopards.

But it will be a little better than a neutral site for the Purple & White, who have played a game against the Zanesville Blue Devils at Sulsberger Stadium nearly every other season since 1992. They beat the Blue Devils 26-7 there last fall.

Last season, Louisville defeated Tri-Valley (which knocked the Chiefs out of the playoffs in the opening round) and DeSales en route to making the state finals, where they lost an exciting championship game to Cincinnati Anderson, 31-25.

In that game, Louisville quarterback Neal Seaman, who is expected to be in the running for state “Mr. Football” honors at the end of the current season, threw a Division II state finals-record four touchdown passes — three to fellow junior Brandon Mathie, who caught 11 passes that night — and went 29-of-45 for 283 yards, all DII finals records. He also rushed for 91 yards.

So does that give you an idea of a good place to start when evaluating the Leopards?

“Yes,” Amyx said emphatically.

“We’ve seen two very good quarterbacks the last two weeks” in Chillicothe’s Caleb Knights and Dublin Jerome’s Kevin Jackson, Amyx added, “and he fits right in there. I don’t think he runs quite as well as Knights but he’s every bit as good of a passer as Patrick (junior Logan QB Patrick Angle).”

And that in itself is high praise indeed, considering Angle has broken nearly every single-season passing record on the LHS books.

Did you ever get the feeling you were looking directly into a mirror? It sure looks that way when comparing the Chieftains and Leopards. Both teams are 11-0 for a lot of reasons… many of them quite similar.

“They throw the ball a lot and they have very good pass-blocking to run their option,” Amyx said. “They don’t have as big of a line as Ironton or Zanesville, but they’re as quick and athletic us. They’re not small.

“They’re also like us (in that) they’re not going to power the ball at you, but they’re going to run out of a spread and finesse you,” he continued.

And, much like the Chieftains, the Leopards will throw the ball to several different receivers.

“(Seaman) has a very strong arm and he’ll throw it or run it,” Amyx noted, “and he’ll dish the ball to different people. They don’t have one single person you can key on, the same as us.

“Their tailback (senior Dane Mathie) is a tall, quick kid,” he observed. Brandon Mathie “has been their top receiver all year, and (senior Tyler Jones) is a 6-5 receiver who will cause us some matchup problems.”

This game will likely be decided by which defense better controls the other team’s offense. The Louisville offense, like that of the Chiefs, tends to make a lot of big plays.

“They’re quick and aggressive and they will be very tough to get outside on,” Amyx said of the Louisville defense. “We’ve got to jump into some different defenses. We need to get back to disguising some of the things (the Chiefs do on defense). I’m sure they feel the same about us.

“We have to be careful because it will be a lot harder to do some of the things we like to do,” he added. “We’ll have to mix things up and play a little tighter.”

The 2008 Chiefs are a far cry from the grind-it-out Logan teams of the past that ate up yardage and clock time in huge chunks. The Chieftains want to maintain control of the ball, but…

“The most important thing for us is just to score any time, any way we can,” Amyx noted. “We would like to move the ball and eat up the clock, and it would be nice to get some long drives, but the biggest thing is to score as much as we can when we can and make some plays (on defense).”

Logan has scored first in 10 of its 11 games and in so doing has trailed for only five minutes and 25 seconds. The Chiefs haven’t been behind at halftime all season and were behind all of 22 seconds in the third quarter in their regular-season finale at Chillicothe two weeks ago.

Getting out to an early lead against Louisville is thus more essential than ever — and the bigger the better.

“We’ve seen a couple (Louisville game films) in which the games were fairly close,” Amyx revealed. “They were ahead of Canton South just 12-6 (in the fourth quarter) and were struggling — they weren’t getting big plays and (South) was shutting off the short-pass plays — so if we can force them to punt the ball and keep the game tight going into the fourth quarter, that’s what we want.”

That’s what happened eight years ago at Lancaster High School’s Fulton Field, when the Chieftains kept things close and knocked off Pickerington 28-26 in a regional second-round game… the same round they’re in this week against Louisville, for only the second time in school history.

And Amyx still remembers almost every play of that Pickerington game.

“They really couldn’t stop us and we couldn’t stop them, and we thought it was going to come down to who had the ball last,” recalled Amyx, who has been coaching in the Logan system for well over a quarter-century, “then we knocked down that two-point conversion pass and then stopped them on a fumble on the last drive.

“That was the only time we’ve been to the third round (of the playoffs),” he added. “We know this would be a big win for the school and the history of this program.”

The 2000 Logan-Pickerington game is regarded by many as the greatest football game in a century of Chieftain football. Just getting to the second round of the playoffs likely puts Friday’s Logan-Louisville game in the top five.

Will this game move into contention with Pickerington ’00? Stay tuned.
 
 

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