Season's One-Third Over

If this was the NFL, the exhibition season ended tonight.

This is high school football, so the non-conference portion of the Gryphons' schedule is over.

I've told you all week we needed someone make us sweat in the second half and we got that from Northern Vance.

Just because I said we needed it, didn't mean I wanted it. But we got it anyway.

What the Gryphons got was a team that thought it could beat us and did everything in its power to make it happen. In the end, the test that we needed we got and we passed.

Here we were playing a team that we should have played in three weeks ago - playing in front of a mostly empty stadium. If there was 500 paying customers, then there was a huge crowd. Only about 100 made the trip from Rocky Mount, including the cheerleaders.

They were playing on a Thursday (that's JV night). The field was muddy (a soccer match was played on it the night before). The baseball coach at NV, who was the PA announcer, said that they had a big rain Tuesday morning, but even in drought conditions, that field stays wet. Most importantly, we found out tonight other teams don't lay down and die when we show up.

We were given a supreme effort by a team with a slippery QB and a wide receiver who had the ability to make catches even when we had him covered.

The defense held them to seven points and a dropped punt snap supplied the other three points for them. They scored their 10 points in a two-minute span. The first half, the Gryphons' defense played as if they were suppose to fall down every time we touched them. However, the Vikings did not buy into that idea.

Here is a telling stat from this game which tells me why I am happy with this game.

In the first half, Rocky Mount had the ball four times. We had one touchdown, on field goal, a lost fumble and a dropped punt snap.

In the second half, we had a 86-yard scoring drive, a field goal, a one-play touchdown and we ran out the clock.

We had eight possessions and scored on five and ran out the clock on another. We did about as good as any other game. The Vikings did a great job of keeping the ball from us.

Junior running back Marquavis Alston is rounding into shape after his ankle injury at J.H. Rose . He now has 260 yards on 17 carries over the last two games.

QB Collins Cuthrell continues to throw long passes with accuracy and Keith Strickland continues to catch long passes.

The defense came to play in the second half and the Vikings' quarterback Americus Williams did a good job of eluding our pressure all night until the very end.

Bottom line tonight - we needed to see how we would play with the game on the line and we played the second half the way we played the first five games of the season - full-throttle.

The Gryphons passed a major exam - 26-10 over Northern Vance.

There is good news to pass along to you. As we signed off the air tonight, we reported that Nash Central and Bunn were tied 20-20 and heading into overtime.

In the third overtime, Nash Central scores first and makes a two-point conversion and Bunn scores on their first play, but misses the two-pointer, so the Bulldogs win 34-32.

I know everyone thinks that we should have put 50 on the board and because we didn't we didn't play well. We didn't play well in the first half because for the first time this year ,we were not spitting nails getting off the bus, but NV was.

We survived a challenge which will make us a better team as we head to conference play next week against Northern.