Bishop Media Sports Network
The New Era
By: Michael Spiers
TheSouthernSportsEdition.com news services
The high school football regular season has come to an end for the Camden County Wildcats but hope springs eternal as they prepare to travel to Kennesaw to begin the Georgia 6-A playoffs on Friday, November 15th.
It has been a year of big change for the Columbia-blue Cats. We saw the retirement of legendary football coach Jeff Herron not long after Camden’s unlikely run to the final four of the playoffs last year.
That was followed by the hiring of new head man, Travis Roland, out of Mainland High School in Daytona Beach, where his Buccaneers had just won the Florida 3S state championship.
Coach Roland immediately hired Grant Alford out of Florida’s Lake Minneola High School to be the Wildcats new Offensive Coordinator, and the change from Jeff Herron’s vaunted Wing-T, power running offense was converted to a more modern, pro-style attack.
The players enthusiastically took to the new schemes and produced scoring averages and statistics that would be surprising to any longtime follower of Camden County High School football.
During the five non-region matchups to start the season, the Wildcats averaged 54.4 points and 420 yards of offense per game.
Camden’s average of 213 passing yards each week during that span is probably what surprised folks the most. You read that correctly. Camden County High School is passing the football.
Those first five contests, in order, included victories over: Brunswick 51-41; East Lake (Tarpon Springs, FL) 60-15; West Broward (Pembroke Pines, FL) 52-29; Ribault (Jacksonville) 62-6; and Spruce Creek (Port Orange, FL) 47-20.
In the non-region games, Camden’s junior quarterback, Parks Riendeau, was an impressive 67/94 passing, with 1,030 passing yards, 13 touchdowns and only one interception.
Senior tight end, Elyiss Williams, who is committed to the University of Georgia, had six receiving touchdowns during that span while senior running back Jordan Hardy contributed and eye-popping 13 rushing touchdowns.
Once October arrived, so did the tough competition of GHSA Region 1-6A. But even before the region play could even begin, Hurricane Helene wreaked havoc on the schedule.
Camden ended up traveling to face the Valdosta Wildcats on a Saturday and was sent back home with 56-37 loss.
The Wildcats returned home to Chris Gillman Stadium the next week and rebounded with a 28-10 victory over the Richmond Hill Wildcats.
Camden then lost two consecutive region games, a 33-7 loss to Lowndes and a 51-41 loss to Colquitt County.
After such a promising start to the season, Camden County found itself with a 1-3 region record heading into the final contest of the year, a home matchup against Tift County High School.
In order to reach the playoffs, the Wildcats had to beat the Blue Devils and hope for a Colquitt County victory over Richmond Hill.
Camden beat Tift 38-28, and Colquitt County took care of its business. As a result, Camden County earned the fourth spot in Region 1-6A, and a trip to Kennesaw to face the 10-0 North Cobb Warriors is round one of the playoffs. These Wildcats are ready for another magical playoff run.
QB Parks Riendeau finished the regular season by completing 121 of 204 pass attempts for 1,732 yards, with 20 touchdowns and just five interceptions.
Elyiss Williams had 52 catches for 764 yards and 11 touchdowns, while sophomore wideout Sean Green finished the regular season with 41 receptions for 500 yards and four touchdowns.
Senior running back Jordan Hardy ended up with 128 carries for 831 and 17 rushing touchdowns while playing in just nine games.
Junior David ‘DC’ Coleman finished with 20 kickoff returns for 583 yards and 3 touchdowns, while adding one additional punt return for a touchdown.
On defense, Camden County was led by junior linebacker Xavier Brown with 116 total tackles, including 8 tackles for loss and a quarterback sack.
Senior outside linebacker Wayne Austell contributed 91 total tackles including six tackles for loss and two quarterback sacks.
Sophomore weakside linebacker Kingston Melton recorded 53 total tackles with six tackles for loss, in addition to a fumble recovery returned for a touchdown.
Camden County Wildcats Coach’s Show w Travis Roland November 5 2024
Trojan Quest
By: Kenneth Harrison
TheSouthernSportsEdition.com news services
The 2024 high school football regular season is over for the Carrollton Trojans.
The top team in 6A is Carrolton (10-0) and they finished the year undefeated. The season finale was against #4 Douglas County (8-2) last week and they won 49-28.
Douglas County got within 27-21 in the second quarter before Carrolton scored three unanswered touchdowns in the second half.
The Trojans are led by four-star quarterback Julian Lewis. Lewis was 21-of-26 passing for 290 yards and two touchdowns. Kimauri Farmer rushed for 147 yards and three touchdowns and caught a 47-yard TD pass.
Messiah Satterwhite rushed for 98 yards and two touchdowns and caught a 26-yard pass. The game decided the No. 1 seed from Region 2.
Lewis is ranked as the #14 player in Georgia for the class of 2025 and he is committed to USC. Lewis did take his fourth visit to Colorado in late October so he might not stay committed to USC for much longer. He turned seventeen in September and he reclassified in January 2024 to graduate one year early.
After the Elite 11 Finals in June he ranked seventh out of that group. He also appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated in October 2023. I’m saying that to say, he’s kind of a big deal.
Julian’s father, T.C., has spent a lot of time preparing him to be a big time QB prospect.
Carrolton’s head coach is Joey King. King spent five years as the head coach at Cartersville, where he won two state championships with Trevor Lawrence. He was the fastest in state history to reach 50 wins, in 52 games.
King left high school to become the wide receivers coach at Coastal Carolina from 2019-21. Once King took over as Carrolton’s head coach T.C. moved Julian to Carrolton for eighth grade.
Lewis attended Pace Academy before that, which is a private school in Atlanta.
“If a kid is trying to go to Harvard, I need him enrolled in that kind of [school],” T.C. says, “but if he’s trying to go play at Alabama, Georgia, wherever, then let me put him in AP Football.”
The GHSA moved the start of the playoffs back in early October due to Hurricane Helene. They moved the end of the regular season from Nov. 1 to Nov. 8 and pushed the opening round of the state playoffs back to Nov. 15 and16.
GHSA said the week of Nov. 8 will be used for makeup games. Schools that completed games without schedule interruptions and are advancing to the postseason will have an open week before the first round of the playoffs.
Carrolton’s next game will be 11/15 against Dacula. The Falcons are 4-6 and ranked fourth in Region 8. This should be an easy blow-out win for the Trojans. They advanced to the state championship game in 2022 and they look to do that again in 2024.
I think they are talented enough to reach the state championship but I think #2 Buford (9-1) is the best team. Their only loss on the season was the season opener to the top team in 5A, Milton.
Jason Bishop Show October 31 2024
Frederica Academy Knights Coach’s Show w Brandon Derrick October 30 2024
Lost Luster?
By: Jeff Doke
TheSouthernSportsEdition.com news services
For almost every year of my five decades on this planet, the end of October has been a time of the year I have enthusiastically anticipated.
As a young boy, it was the sirens call of Halloween, with the annual trip to Gibson’s to select the perfect Ben Cooper costume and the anticipation of how many houses in Northwood Estates would have full-size candy bars this year (we could always count on a couple).
As I grew older, the building anticipation came from when we would be making our annual trip to the Jaycees haunted house.
I think my dad and I had more fun laughing at the other people scared out of their wits than we were ever actually scared by the experience.
At least once he tried to chase down a group that literally ran screaming from the exit just so he could offer to pay to let them go through again. Fifty-two years and I’m not sure I’ve ever laughed harder.
After that, it became a matter of wondering if I was going to get invite to the good Halloween parties in high school. Think post-pubescent Charlie Brown obsessively checking his locker to see if any notes had been slipped in between classes. Spoiler alert: they rarely were.
The one constant through all of those eras – as well as every era since – has been the heady anticipation of the one UGA football rivalry that hasn’t been shuffled and re-dealt by the SEC home offices.
The one game that we could pretty much always count on being on TV, even in the four channel days when our Dawg fix would usually come from WGIG via the global band AM radio in my dad’s workshop.
From the Dooley days to Goff, on through Donnan and Richt, and finally the arrival of King Kirby, the end of October meant one thing and one thing only to the mean machine in Red & Black – the World’s Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party. The Border War. The Georgia Florida game.
During the lean years, Ga/Fla was our SEC Championship before there was such a thing. It was the Super Bowl, Worl Series, and Daytona 500 all rolled into one. It was the pinnacle of the football year. We could go 0-11 the rest of the year as long as we beat Florida…okay 1-10. Still gotta thump Tech. Priorities, man.
It’s a well-established fact that the Spurrier years were rough for the rivalry. Ole’ Satan in a Sun visor had our number just about every single year, and hope was hard to come by.
I was briefly involved with a Florida fan once, and she said that in those days, Florida fans didn’t care about the game because they knew they were going to win, they were just glad to be able to drink at the tailgate.
Ouch. Not inaccurate, but ouch, nonetheless.
Those days are thankfully a thing of the past, and the tables have turned just about as much as any table could.
Dawg fans are living through the golden years and should appreciate them as such.
Gator nation on the other hand is suffering through one off the worst SEC coaching administrations for someone not named “Dave Shula.”
Billy “Swing blade” Napier is bad. Really bad. Historically so in the annuls of Gainesville programs. Recruiting, coaching, PR, the Gators are stinking up the joint on all points, have been since the end of the Mullen run, and there is no real sense of hope that it will get any better anytime soon.
Considering all of this, has the WLOCP lost some of it’s luster? Does a massively lopsided matchup make this game anything less than “Must See TV?”
What, are you kidding me? Did you not hear me mention Spurrier a few paragraphs back? Remember those years. Remember the mocking, the sneering, the drunken gator chomps you endured walking back to the parking garage from the Gator Bowl/AllTel/EverBank.
Revel in the fact that we’re the ones barking now while the jorts-clad masses are weeping into their Mike’s Hard Lemonade.
And Go Dawgs!
MCA Buccaneers Coach’s Show w Bradley Warren October 29 2024
Camden County Wildcats Coach’s Show w Travis Roland October 29 2024
Stars To Align?
By: Robert Craft
TheSouthernSportsEdition.com news services
Florida head coach Billy Napier probably didn’t save his job by drubbing Kentucky.
But maybe he did enough in a must-not-lose game to think maybe, just maybe, there’s maybe a path to a fourth season for Billy.
The beatdown provided a dose of optimism that Napier can coach a high caliber team in the future, if not this season.
Injuries to veteran starters Graham Mertz and Montrell Johnson meant Florida had to start true freshmen at quarterback (DJ Lagway) and running back (Jadan Baugh) for the first time in program history. That duo sparked the Gators’ best offensive performance in years.
Beating Kentucky is a baseline expectation at Florida. It used to be, at least; the Gators won 31 in a row before Mark Stoops snapped the streak in 2018.
Stoops won his first two against Napier. No Florida coach has lost three in a row to Kentucky in more than 70 years (Bob Woodruff, 1948-51). Napier, compared to his expectations, merely avoided ignominy with a win Saturday.
Besides, the real tests are still ahead. The 4-3 Gators were off last week before the daunting, season-ending stretch fans have been dreading for months: No. 2 Georgia in Jacksonville, at No. 5 Texas, home against No. 8 LSU and No. 18 Ole Miss and at rival FSU.
In Austin, TX, in front of a stadium-record 105,215 fans, Kirby Smart’s Dawgs (6-1, 4-1 SEC) unleashed the most havoc-wreaking defensive performance of the season in a 30-15 win.
It got so bad, so fast for Texas (6-1, 2-1 SEC), trailing 20-0 in the second quarter, that Steve Sarkisian briefly benched starting QB Quinn Ewers for, only to go back to Ewers after two series.
Neither QB had a chance, given the Horns offensive line had no answers for Georgia pass rushers Jason Walker (three sacks, four QB hurries), Mykel Williams(two sacks) and Damon Wilson (one strip-sack).
Georgia may well turn around and lay an egg against Florida, but they can afford it. Kirby Smart will not allow the Dawgs to be flat in Jacksonville.
The Dawgs open up as a 17 1/2 point Favorite against the Gators.
Florida hasn’t played a team as talented on the roster as Georgia. The Gators will need the stars to align to have a chance at the cocktail party.
If Billy Napier can pull off a miraculous victory over the heavily favored Dawgs, he may be able to save his job for one more season.
Georgia just has way way way too much talent for this game to even be close. Also, this game is personal for Kirby and Georgia starting quarterback Carson Beck.
To quote Clubber Lane from Rocky III my prediction is PAIN!
Georgia 47
Florida 20
Hope
By: Jeff Doke
TheSouthernSportsEdition.com news services
Hope springs eternal in the human breast.” “An Essay On Man”, Alexander Pope, 1732.
There’s a fun little recurring character in the “SEC Shorts” video series named Hope. She premiered before the 2021 Georgia championship season and spent most of the season hyping up the Dawgs’ national championship aspirations.
While it eventually turned out that those hopes were well-founded, Hope left at the end of the season for Texas A&M. While that seemed like the most likely fanbase in need of some hopefulness, there were several other destinations she could have landed – Tennessee, Kentucky, or Missouri for example.
Florida, however, was firmly not on that list.
Hope hasn’t dared to set foot in Gainesville for a while now. The Gators have not had bonafied National Championship aspirations since Urban Meyer’s alleged “cardiac incident.”
While Muschamp, McElwain, and Mullen managed to have more wins than losses in their alliterative runs in the swamp, Florida now finds Billy Napier at the helm.
O Hope, where art thou?
Not in Gainesville, that’s for sure. Although the 2024 Gators go into the WLOCP with a surprising 4-2 record (3 more wins at this point than I predicted in the preseason), the high point of the season may have already passed them by.
Consecutive matchups against UGA, Texas, LSU, and Ole Miss await the Gators in the month of November.
Granted their regular season wraps up against the even-bigger-dumpster-fire that is the 2024 FSU Seminoles, but it looks like once again the 2024 Florida gators Bowl Game t-shirts are gonna be plain white Fruit Of The Looms, straight out of the cellophane wrapper.
The future isn’t looking much brighter. The 2025 Gators recruiting class sits at 33rd in the nation, 15th in the SEC.
The 2026 class is better, clocking in at 11th nationally and 7th in the conference, but if Billy Napier somehow manages to avoid the axe this postseason, expect some of those commits to bail and those rankings to take a tumble.
For the moment, let’s look at the here and now. In this, the greatest of all border war matchup in CFB, it is well known that the records do not matter.
Upsets aplenty when these two teams mix it up on the banks of the St. John’s; Florida costing the Dawgs a shot at the National Championship in 2002, UGA knocking off #1 Florida in 1985, and the “unsportsmanlike conduct on the entire team” game all come to mind…but what about 2024?
Let’s be honest. This is a weird season. Army & Navy are both undefeated. Alabama has two losses. Vanderbilt made an appearance in the Top 25, for crying out loud. Would a Napier defeat of Kirby be too far out of the question?
To be blunt, yes.
The Dawgs are on the hunt after the Alabama loss. The defeat of top-ranked Texas shows that they are still an elite program. Above everything else, Kirby Smart’s hatred of all things blue & orange is well documented. I’m not a betting man, but if I were, I’d be selling off a few semi-vital organs on the black market just to put more down on the Dawgs to walk away from EverBank Stadium with the W.
Yes, hope springs eternal, but if you’re looking for Hope in Florida this weekend, I’d try Mons Venus in Tampa, maybe the pickleball courts in The Villages.
Not Jacksonville, though. Hope doesn’t live there for the Gators.
