Unfortunately, this is the last Friday Night Notes column of 2016.
It almost wasn’t that way, as the Cougars played, for the most part, a solid game against a tough East Lake team. I thought that it was one of the finest, if not the finest, defensive performances I’ve seen from Durant this year, and that many playoff teams could have been shut down by that unit.
The offense wasn’t so hot, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. East Lake didn’t have a hard time stacking the box and limiting Durant’s forward progress, and the pass coverage did enough to slow the Cougars’ receivers down and force overthrows.
A lot of that, I noticed, was due to holds and things that didn’t get called. I get it, it’s the playoffs and refs are more likely to let the kids play. But the balance of calls was pretty heavily skewed in East Lake’s favor, and I’m not sure Durant deserved everything it got.
My chief example came at the 5:38 mark of the fourth quarter, when what should have been a successful Durant fourth-down conversion was ruled a turnover on downs after a bad spot, which was then moved forward, again ruled a turnover and, despite numerous requests from the Durant sideline, not measured.
I can confirm that this happened because I was standing about five yards from the spot, and the whole thing unfolded right in front of me. I’ve never seen anything like that in a high school game and, while I’m not going to say that a fix was in, I’m of the opinion that the crew favored the local team it probably knows well, and didn’t care much for these kids from over an hour away in Hillsborough. How are you not going to measure that, especially after moving the ball in the direction Durant was trying to go, past the chain crew?
The Durant coaches showed a heck of a lot more restraint disputing that call than I would have. It was easily the worst call I’ve seen all season, and I’ve seen refs get chewed out worse for lesser sins.
While I can’t say it directly affected the outcome of the game – the Cougars were at midfield and may or may not have scored on that drive – I’m pretty confident that that incident was what turned the tables in East Lake’s favor for the rest of the night.
Still, the Eagles played tough football and did enough to win the game. I can’t knock them for something the refs did, and I’m not trying to start a conspiracy theory about it.
It’s probably (OK, definitely) unfair that the refs tried the Cougars like that. But there’s no point making excuses for a loss, even to a team that called a quarterback sneak draw play on third down and long. Durant’s remaining Cougars will learn from this loss and probably do everything in their power to try and win districts next year, avoiding the road games for a while.
If I can borrow a page from Dabo Swinney’s playbook, hats off to Durant for having a better season than what was expected of it, even with those key injuries. Our district is far from an easy one, but the Cougars stepped up when they had to fight for a playoff spot.