“There’s not too many teams, unless that team is just terrible, that you’re going to beat when you turn it over five times.”
Habersham Central High School Head Football Coach Benji Harrison summed up the night for the Raiders (0-2) with one sentence following the team’s 23-13 loss to Flowery Branch High School (1-1) on the road Friday.
HCHS dropped its first two games to start the season for the eighth time in the last 20 seasons. It marks the first time since the 2012-15 seasons that the program has started 0-2 in consecutive seasons.
“We expected to win that one,” Harrison said. “You expect to win every (game) you play, but we felt like, if we played good, we expect to win that game. I told them right before the game, just because you’re the better team, you think, you’ve got to play like the better team. When you turn it over five times, you’re not playing like you’re the better team.”
No turnover in football comes at a good time. But it seemed that every turnover on the night for the Raiders (4 fumbles, 1 interception) was in the worst possible spot.
The Raiders forced a 3-and-out on the Falcons’ first drive and got the same treatment from the Flowery Branch defense. On the HCHS punt, the Falcons got to punter Camden Meads before he got the ball away, bringing him down for a loss and a turnover on downs.
Flowery Branch took advantage of short field position and put up points on a short touchdown run with 6:46 left in the first quarter.
On the next drive, the Raiders fumbled the ball away. On the first play for the Falcons, the HCHS defense has a clear and obvious facemask penalty called against them. On the next play, Flowery Branch scores again and have their point after try blocked.
The lead is now 13-0 with 4:02 left in the first.
The Raiders answer on offense is an ineligible receiver downfield on first down, then a false start on the next play, followed by a big sack from the Falcons’ defense. Then an interception for the home team puts the ball on the 7-yard line.
HCHS gets a break with a bad snap for the Flowery Branch offense and the defense is able to force a 31-yard field goal, which was good.
The Falcons held a 16-0 lead with 23 seconds left in the first quarter.
The next drive for the Raiders hands the ball back to Flowery Branch with a fumble on the snap that quarterback DJ Pass is unable to collect before the defense pounces.
The Falcons kept their 16-0 lead until just over three minutes were gone off the clock in the third quarter.
The Raiders took the opening kickoff of the second half and put together an effective drive, which senior running back Antonio Cantrell capped off with a rushing score. The two-point conversion attempt saw Zeke Whittington tackled short of the goal line from his wildcat quarterback position.
With 9:40 left in the game, quarterback Paris Wilbanks punched in a short run to pull HCHS within three points, 16-13, of the lead.
The Falcons put together a long, extended drive and milked time off the clock. What the Raiders needed was just around the corner as they forced a fumble and recovered in their half of the field.
Just three points back and the ball in hand, HCHS was poised to complete the comeback. But the first snap of the drive was a bad one and Flowery Branch snatched the ball off the turf.
With 1:55 left in the contest, the Falcons put the final points on the board to push the game out of reach.
“I know this – if you’ve got a chance to win the game in the fourth quarter, you’ve turned it over four times (at that point), and you still have a chance, that tells you you’re not a bad football team, you’ve just got to clean a lot of things up,” Harrison said. “Nobody really cares or wants to hear it, but we’re young and we’re making some young mistakes. It can be really, really frustrating. It’s not frustrating for anybody more than it is me.
“You can sit here and make all the excuses and all that. The bottom line is we’re 0-2, we don’t want to be 0-3, so we’ve got to get it fixed.”
The last time the Raiders started the season 0-3 was in Harrison’s first year with a death row schedule and a program inherited from former coach Michael Pollack, who went 1-19 in his two years at the helm.
“I think, right now, you don’t focus on that. We’ve got to go beat White County. That’s what you focus on,” Harrison said. “You don’t talk about being 0-2 and the possibility of being 0-3. You’ve got to focus on beating White County and that’s all we can do right now.”
The first two weeks of the season have had themes of challenging the team with different things – leaders to step up, the offensive line to take more pride in their physicality up front, the quarterbacks to take on more leadership of the offense.
This next week heading into White County will be no different. The coaches will figure out those challenges after watching film from Friday night, but “don’t turn the ball over is one you can start with,” Harrison said.
The coaching staff and senior players face another challenge outside of that.
“They’re down,” Harrison said. “The challenge now is us holding this thing together, holding the guys together, the guys still believing in what’s ahead of us. That’s our job as coaches, that’s going to take our seniors on the football team helping with that.”
Turnovers were the clear issue on Friday, but the underlying issues that aren’t as obvious have to be addressed for the Raiders to move forward into Week 3 and beyond and have a shot at a successful season.
“We’re disappointed right now with how it went. Nobody thought it would go that way, myself included, but it did,” Harrison said. “It stinks and everybody is upset about it. I can tell you that nobody is more upset about it than I am.
“It’s my job to fix it, so that’s what I’m going to try to do.”
HCHS opens its home schedule next Friday, August 30, against White County at Raider Stadium. The Raiders will hold Ring of Honor night prior to the contest.
