West Laurens at Mary Persons: Will defenses dominate again in region showdown?

A year ago, there was plenty of talent on the field, especially on defense.

West Laurens had a talented group, led by Jathaniel Allen (116 tackles), Shundrekus Smith (77 tackles, 5 sacks), Lederrius Williams (6 sacks) and Mataio Elvine (66 tackles), to name a few.

Mary Persons had, of course, highly recruited end Malik Herring, but also the very underrated Tre Howard and Dan O’Neal on the defensive line, and standouts like Tay Jarrell, Vic Henderson and Dalon Edge behind them.

            The game in Dexter showed as much, Mary Persons winning 14-2 in a defensive slobberknocker.

All of those players are gone, but here again are the Raiders and Bulldogs, undefeated in region and basically playing for the top seed out of Region 2-AAAA Friday night at Dan Pitts Stadium.

Neither team has quite the juice this year as last year, certainly at least on defense.

 “Defensively, I think it’s hard to match what they’ve put on the field the past few years,” West Laurens first-year head coach Kagan McClain said. “They may not be quite as dominant as they have been in the past, but they’re still really good.”

McClain does have some talented players – like Joseph Horne, Noah Garnto, Ben Deal, Doryan Gorham and Abram Morrow, among others - returning and junior Dorian Edmund is doing a nice job of taking over at tailback for the talented Darius Bradford, whose final two seasons were marred somewhat by a knee injury. Edmund has 661 yards and three touchdowns, getting 4.5 yards a carry.

“Yeah, they don’t have the Bradford kid that was there for like 17 years,” Mary Persons head coach Brian Nelson joked. “But they’ve got some linemen that are back. They’re not a whole lot different offensively. (Edmund) does a good job for them.”

The Raiders and sophomore quarterback A.J. Mathis are throwing more, and already have completed 20 more passes than all of last year, despite replacing Bradford and some skill players. Mathis is 58 for 133 for 789 yards with six touchdowns and three interceptions.

The Raiders lost 15 starters from a good 7-5 team.

“We knew it was going to kind of be a brand new team this year,” said Kagan, also the defensive coordinator. “We’ve played defensively real well at times, and played poorly at times.”

Mary Persons also has a returning underclassman quarterback with J.T. Hartage, and the Bulldogs are taking advantage of that experience. He is seventh in Central Georgia with 1,067 yards, and among the tops in completion percentage at 70.1 percent, plus 14 touchdowns to only two interceptions despite losing a number of quality targets and battling a banged up backfield.

“I think they’re much better offensively this year than they have been in the past,” McClain said of the Bulldogs.

But the teams mirror the region, which isn’t as strong as the past few years but has more parity. Only one team, Spalding, is under .500 overall.

West Laurens is 4-3, compared to 5-2 a year ago. Two of the losses are to the same teams, Dodge County and Warner Robins, and the Indians and Demons are much better this year, as is Wayne County, the Raiders’ third loss.

“The three teams that beat us, I think they’re combined record is like (20-1),” McClain said. “It’s not like we’ve lost to any (weak) teams.”

Mary Persons is 5-2 again with losses to Peach County and a higher classification team, highly ranked Class 6A Lee County this year, and Houston County last year. In both losses to the bigger programs, Mary Persons was very competitive and had a chance to pull off the upset.

“I look at how good they played against Lee County,” McClain said of the opener. “I know that was early in the year, but …”

A year ago, Mary Persons was outscoring opponents 24.9-9.6 and West Laurens 26.3-9. This year, both numbers are up for Mary Persons (30.7-15.7) and down for West Laurens (19.7-16.3).

“We’re just not putting it all together,” said Nelson, who has three blowouts to go with a single-digit loss and one single-digit win. “We’re just missing that little something on Friday nights. We’re close to it.”

But Nelson worries about continuing to just miss.

“The more you do that, the more chance that eventually something bad’s going to happen,” he said. “It was about this time last year we started to get it churning.”

Nevertheless, a repeat of a 16-point game is highly unlikely with two defenses that aren’t quite as sporty as last year. But Mary Persons’ offense may be the big difference.

“I don’t mean this in a negative way, but they’ve always been really, really good on defense and (kind of) average on offense,” McClain said. “Probably like people say about us the last three years.

“I think this year offensively they’re doing some good things, they’re consistent. They got a big receiver out there that can go get it, a couple slot guys that can run, a couple tailbacks that can run hard.”