If it’s going to end a three-year playoff drought, Pillow Academy faces a must-win game this week.
This will be a re-occurring theme for the Mustangs as they close the regular season with four conference games in the next five weeks. That run starts Friday night in Columbus against Heritage Academy in a North AAA, Division II contest. Kickoff is set for 7.
The Mustangs are tied for third in the five-team league, which sends the top two teams to the postseason, at 1-2 with Heritage. Starkville is in first place, while Magnolia Heights moved into second at 2-2 last week with a 34-31 overtime win over PA.
“It’s just another week,” said Pillow head coach Tripp McCarty. “We need to win this one for a lot of reasons. First, to get this bad taste from last week out of our mouths and for what it means in the playoff race.
“We still feel really good about things. We still feel like we can accomplish everything we want to, outside of an undefeated season. We still control our own destiny.”
After a 5-0 start that included a conference win over Madison-Ridgeland Academy, the Mustangs have dropped two in a row. The two-game skid started with a 22-3 loss at Jackson Academy, which used two fourth-quarter turnovers to break away from a 3-3 tie.
The Magnolia Heights loss was the worst outing of the season for the Mustang defense, which came in allowing just 8.1 points a contest. The Chiefs pounded away at the heart of the PA defense with pretty good success and hit for two long touchdown runs, 81 and 95 yards.
The common denominator in both losses for the Mustangs was an inability to consistently run the ball, which has been their bread and butter offensively. PA averaged just 1.9 yards per rush against JA and 3.8 per carry against the Chiefs.
“We have challenged our backs to crank it up because we feel like they haven’t played their best of late. We feel like our offensive line is getting better each week so we need our backs to match that,” McCarty said.
Sophomore backup quarterback Cole Whitfield provided the struggling PA offense with a spark last week by running for 46 yards and passing for 99 yards and a touchdown. McCarty expects Whitfield to share some time at quarterback this week with senior Cooper Dunn.
“We like them both. Being able to use Cole some frees us to move Cooper around some. We’ll go that direction as both continue to progress at that position,” said the first-year PA head coach.
Off a 22-13 loss to Washington School, Heritage comes into Friday’s game at 4-3. The Patriots have also lost to Caledonia, 32-26, and Jackson Academy, 35-13.
