Sitting at No. 15 in the Georgia High School Association’s PSR rankings that seed the 32 teams in each classification’s playoff bracket, the McEachern football team entered Friday night’s game on the bubble for being one of the 16 teams that will host at least one game in the Class 7A playoffs.
The Indians officially put those worries to rest, clinching the Region 3-7A championship with a 29-13 victory over Harrison and securing a first-round home game that all region champions are guaranteed.
The region title was McEachern’s second straight, the third in head coach Kareem Reid’s four seasons at the school, and the 10th since 2009. McEachern was one of 23 teams that clinched a region championship this week.
The Indians are 7-2 overall, with losses to Gainesville and Marietta, and 5-0 in Region 3-7A.
“Our goal at the beginning of the season every year is, first and foremost, we want to win the region,” Reid said. “We did that. And obviously we want to get in the playoffs and win a state championship. That’s our ultimate goal. But we got the first one. Now we’ll go back and watch the tapes, clean up our mistakes, and get ready to finish off the regular season the right way next week at Kennesaw Mountain and prepare ourselves for whoever we face in the first round.”
McEachern sophomore running back Ty Nolan stole the spotlight at the Indians’ senior night at Walter Cantrell Stadium, which is undergoing major construction on its home bleachers. Nolan rushed for a career-high 237 yards on 20 carries and scored all three of his team’s touchdowns.
“Ty’s been getting better every single week,” Reid said. “He ran for a bunch of yards the past two weeks. We knew that he gets better as the game goes on, so we wanted to continue to feed him. We felt from watching the tapes that we’d have some success on the ground running him, and that paid dividends and came to fruition tonight.”
Nolan’s longest run of the night was also the one that swung control of the game in McEachern’s favor. On the first play after Harrison took its only lead, quarterback Aiden Watson ran a 3-yard touchdown to make it 7-3 with 3:39 remaining in the first quarter, and Nolan ran 65 yards down the left sideline to the Harrison 12-yard line. Three plays later, he scored on a 1-yard run to make it 9-7, and the Indians pulled away from there.
Nolan, who has already received a reported 29 offers, primarily from Power 4 conference schools, helped stretch the lead to 26-7 with 40- and 19-yard touchdown runs in the third quarter.
Harrison scored its other touchdown on a 33-yard pass from Watson to Carson Kraushaar with 9:30 remaining, cutting the lead to 26-13. McEachern’s Wes Sheehan kicked a late field goal, his third of the night, and the Indians secured the victory with an interception in the end zone by Kayden Battle with 53 seconds left.
McEachern quarterback Coby Pittman was 11-of-18 passing for 101 yards. Harrison’s Watson was 18-of-35 passing for 158 yards and led the Hoyas in rushing with 70 yards on 15 carries.
Harrison is off next week and finished the regular season 6-4 overall and 3-3 in the region. Entering the game ranked No. 22 in the PSR, the Hoyas most likely will make the playoffs for the 11th straight season.
However, nothing is certain until all of next week’s games are reported to the GHSA and the brackets are completed. In past years, the top four teams from each region advanced to the playoffs and were added to a pre-filled bracket showing the first-round matchups, so teams could figure out ahead of time who they would probably be playing. The PSR system was used in Class 3A, 2A, A Division and 3A-A Private the past two years but wasn’t in place for the other four classes.
“Obviously it affects the way you prepare,” Reid said. “We had an idea of who we were going to play last year, but this year we may not know until that last game is put into the (GHSA’s) system next Friday night. We have no way to get an advanced look or an edge on anybody because we don’t know.”