LOGAN — In a season where Logan’s vaunted spread offense has commanded lots of headlines and statewide attention, has anybody noticed what the Chieftain defense has been doing lately?

How about you, Zanesville Blue Devils? Have you?

Uh, yeah. They have.
In a showdown of undefeated, state-ranked Division II teams with high-octane offenses, it was the Logan defense that stole the show in shutting out the Blue Devils 26-0 Friday night in Logan Chieftain Stadium.

Logan (6-0) held Zanesville to 147 total yards — including just 47 yards and one first down in the second half — and the Blue Devils (5-1) never drove any farther than the Logan 31-yard line all night. Zanesville, which entered Friday night scoring more than 34 points per game, seldom crossed midfield.

“Wow!” exclaimed Logan coach Dale Amyx. “I’m so proud of those kids. They really worked hard all week, studied the film and bought into the game plan… but in my wildest dreams I didn’t think we could shut them out.

“I knew (the Blue Devils) were good,” he continued, “but once we got going I thought ‘we can shut these guys out,’ even early in the first half, because they couldn’t get anything going on us. They got some runs on us (late in the first half) when we were in our nickel package, when we were thinking more pass, but even when we played nickel — and we probably played nickel more than base (defense) the whole night — we stopped the run out of that.”

The Logan defense was really, really impressive, to be sure. It continues to improve and has only allowed 20 points in the past four games.

And as the Logan offense struggled in the early going Friday night, the Chieftain defense turned the contest into a true war of field position.

Quarterback Patrick Angle hooked up with receiver Mason Mays deep over the middle and the senior speedster made a diving catch in the end zone to complete a 42-yard touchdown play on Logan’s very first play from scrimmage. Derek Montgomery added the extra-point kick, and it was 7-0 Logan a little more than two minutes into the game.

But the Chiefs managed just six points the rest of the half — a pair of Montgomery field goals — and led just 13-0 at the intermission.

While Logan had just four first downs in the first half, a couple key defensive plays by the Chieftain defense gave the Logan offense a short field to work with.

Montgomery cashed in, tying a school record for field goals in a single game by booting a 30-yarder early in the first period and a 36-yarder on the opening play of the second stanza.

He went for a school-record third field goal with a little more than a minute remaining in the first half, but his 45-yarder went just low and wide to the left.

“For Derek to do what he did — what a weapon to have,” Amyx praised. “He’s capable of making that (45-yarder), and we’re confident in him when we need him.”

Montgomery already has four field goals this season.

Other than when the Blue Devils recovered a Logan fumble on their own 40, they began every first-half offensive series between their own 14 and 29-yard lines. Logan, meanwhile, started four of its six first-half offensive possessions in Devils territory and another at its own 49-yard line.

And a bad punt snap from center early in the first period resulted in Logan getting great field position at the Zanesville 17. Logan’s Brandon Graham tackled punter Michael Lynn for a 19-yard loss to set up Montgomery’s first FG.

“We just had to stop the run and get them into third-and-long,” said Logan senior middle linebacker Michael Snider, the team’s leading tackler this season. “Obviously they weren’t passing the ball well tonight.”

Indeed. Zanesville quarterback Cole Hudson was just 5-of-20 through the air for a scant 41 yards, and the Chiefs picked him off three times. The Logan “D” didn’t allow him much time to set up and throw.

“We just watched the films, keyed on their key players, studied them hard and practiced hard like we always do every week,” Snider added. “We have the motivation of (possibly) going undefeated and the coaches being behind us 100 percent and all the hard work that we put in.”

Field position continued to play a huge role in the second half. Again, Zanesville was continually pinned deep by the Chiefs, including a third-quarter Angle pooch punt that Mays downed on the Zanesville 1-yard line.

Early in the fourth period, after the Blue Devils fumbled the ball away on their own 42-yard line, the Logan offense finally began to click.

Angle connected with Jordan Rutter (a team-high four receptions for 51 yards) for 20 yards, and 11 more yards were tacked on when Zanesville was called for a facemask penalty on the tackle.

Then, things got a little weird.

Zach McDaniel, who earlier in the game had taken a couple direct snaps in a “wildcat” formation, lined up in front of Angle in the backfield while three Logan players split wide to the left, center Bobby Russell was flanked by two fellow linemen where the ball was spotted, and three more Chiefs were deployed to the far right. Although there were two huge holes in the offensive line, the Zanesville defense looked utterly confused.

Frankly, so was just about everyone else in the stadium… but then again, that was the whole idea.

McDaniel took the direct snap from Russell and went up the middle 11 yards for a touchdown that gave the Chiefs a 19-0 lead with 11:02 remaining.

Okay, Kelly Wolfe, will you please explain what the heck was going on?

“We’ve been practicing that formation for six weeks,” said Logan’s offensive coordinator. “We’ve had it ready to go since the Lancaster game, and we’ve been practicing it, but we’ve never needed it.

“I told the kids tonight we were going to do it no matter what the situation was,” he added. “We call it our spread. It’s just a funky formation to put the defense in a bind — and if you watched Zanesville, they were completely lost. They didn’t know what to do… and that was the whole point.”

But he also admitted he’s not the innovator of such a setup.

“I’m not going to say it’s mine,” he said with a huge grin. “I watched (coach) Urban Meyer run it at Florida, so I got it from him. But we’re trying to keep (the opposition) on their toes and keep them guessing.

“We’ve run a lot of the same stuff the first five weeks. We’ve kept it pretty plain-jane for the most part, but we’ve had all of these (formations) in and have been practicing them since day one,” he added. “I told the kids going into tonight we’re running them all. We ran the wildcat, that spread… we ran a lot of different things tonight, and now teams can’t just sit on everything else that we run.”

It sure gives opposing defenses even more to think about.

“If I’m scouting myself up to this point of the season, we’ve been pretty much 70-30 (percent) pass to run, and we need to balance that up a little bit,” Wolfe revealed. “We felt we could run the ball a little bit against these guys. They’re more our size, but their quickness was, I think, a little more than we were ready for.

“It took us a while to adjust to that,” he continued. “But, again, (last week’s) Ironton game and tonight, we made some really good adjustments at halftime and the kids came out and did what we asked them to do. Down the road you have to be able to make those kind of adjustments - and if you don’t, you’re going to get beat.”

Amyx agreed.

“We struggled offensively at times, but we got it turned around,” he said. “Penalties killed us on some drives, but (Zanesville) also has a good defense. Kelly and I talked and knew it wasn’t going to be easy.”

Logan dealt the knockout blow on its next offensive series when McDaniel took an inside handoff from Angle and scampered 25 yards to the football promised land to make it 26-0.

While Friday night wasn’t a Southeastern Ohio Athletic League game, it wasn’t a run-of-the-mill regular-season non-conference game, either.

And Amyx and the Chiefs had a novel way of approaching it.

“One thing we talked about all week… this is a mid-season playoff game, and that’s how we handled it,” he revealed. “Two teams in the same (playoff) region, and if the season stopped today we’d both be in the playoffs. We may see them again.”

The team goals are “to make the playoffs and go 10-0, win the (SEOAL) and not only make the playoffs but do something in the playoffs — maybe even win a state championship — and you have to beat teams like (Zanesville) to do it. We have some more games like this coming down the road. They beat some pretty good teams to get 5-0, and we have too. The fact we can do that to them builds our confidence even more.”

While the Chiefs’ 218 total yards and 156 passing yards were season lows, they made key plays when necessary. For the most part, though, they let their defense be the star of Friday night’s show.

“I thought it was going to be a close game all the way and come down to the wire,” Amyx said, “but as we got going I really felt ‘man, we can shut these guys out.’ They threw their best stuff at us in the first half and we stopped it. The kids did a great job stopping them. Just an overall great team effort.”

In the overall scheme of things, it’s just one victory for a team that wants to string together as many 1-0 weeks as possible. But let there be no doubt… this particular 1-0 was huge for the Chiefs.

“They’re buying into the one game at a time (approach) and not looking at the rankings and all that stuff,” Amyx said of his players. “That stuff doesn’t mean anything until the end of the season. But, boy, that was a big (win) there. That got us some major playoff points.”

And Snider promised there will be no letdowns as the Chiefs play out the season.

They can’t afford to: two of Logan’s remaining SEOAL foes, Warren and Jackson, are still undefeated.

“Oh, no, not at all,” Snider said. “We plan on working harder and harder every week.”