The 5-4 Tioga Bulldogs football team will hit the road Friday for an opening round playoff contest against the 8-2 Hamilton Bulldogs hosted at Wildcat Stadium in Godley.
Hamilton enters the contest as a No. 1 seed after finishing the regular season unbeaten in district play, with recent victories over Hico 3514 on Oct. 31 and De Leon 2726 on Nov. 7.
“We have a really good opponent this week that we’re somewhat familiar with,” said Zach Birdwell, Tioga athletic director and head football coach. “We played them in 7-on-7 at State this past summer, we ran against them at the state track meet, and it’s a team that Tioga has seen in the playoffs two of the last three years. We know we have our work cut out for us. They’re the No. 1 seed for a reason, and they won the region last year for a reason. They’re a really good ball club that knows how to win.”
Hamilton’s offense enters the matchup averaging 42 points per game over its last five games, powered by a strong running game.
“They are a team that’s going to come out and try to establish the run game, and one thing we’ve been blessed with in our district is that we’ve seen some really good running teams,” Birdwell said. “We got to [play] H.D. Davis, who is going to Kansas State, and Zane Fuentes, who is going to Army, so we’ve seen some talented running backs. We just have to learn from the mistakes we made against those teams and build on that experience.”
Tioga’s signal caller for most of the season, Greeley McAden, went down with injury in the team’s Week 9 contest with Wolfe City, and Birdwell said the play at the position will be crucial if Tioga’s offense hopes to take advantage of a leaky Hamilton defense that gave up over 500 yards of offense to De Leon.
“We have two guys that are going to be playing the position [Caden Downing and Kyson Kirkland] that don’t have a ton of experience, so a lot of it is going to revolve around me being able to get those guys in a rhythm early on and helping them find their confidence,” he said. “[But] no matter who’s back there, we’re going to do what we do on offense. We just have to go take care of the football and execute.”
Tioga enters the matchup as the No. 4 seed, but Birdwell emphasized that it’s a clean slate for all of the teams in the playoffs.
“When you get to this point of the season, what you did in nondistrict, what you did in district, your final district standings and those district championships—all that stuff goes out the window,” he said. “It comes down to who is going to show up, who plays, who performs and who executes for those three or four hours on game night, and that’s been the message this week. We are trying to check all the boxes, Monday through Thursday, that we need to check to set ourselves up to have the best chance to be that team that shows up at 7 p.m. on Friday and executes.”
Tioga and Hamilton will kick off at 7 p.m. Friday at Wildcat Stadium in Godley.
