By RAY BENTON
Leader sports editor
When Cabot and Jacksonville leave the field at Panther Stadium after their season-opening football game on Tuesday, it will end 30 years of the two teams meeting each season. When the series started in the 80s, Jacksonville was the larger and dominant team. Sometime in the mid 90s, Cabot school district became larger than Jacksonville, and the gap has continued to grow to the point that CHS is now more than three times the size of JHS.
Cabot has won all but two games since the turn of the century, including the last five in a row. Some prognosticators believe the 2013 Panthers could be the best one in many years, but none of that fazes Jacksonville coach Rick Russell, who says his team is entering the game with a mindset to win.
“We’re going to do everything we can to win the game,” said Russell. “We feel like we can compete with them. We have to protect the football and execute our game plan. We have to win at the line of scrimmage and if we do all that, we feel like we give ourselves a chance to win.”
The Panthers showed a slightly different formation than they have run in the past. Instead of the dead-T with two tight ends and no wideouts, the Panthers have gone with one tight and one split end. They threw the ball 15 times from that formation in their scrimmage game against Lake Hamilton.
Russell was at the scrimmage game, but doesn’t think there are any dramatic changes in how to prepare for Cabot.
“They’re a little different but it still comes down to that offensive line,” Russell said. “If you can’t stop that line you can’t stop Cabot. So we’re going to try to win at the line.”
Russell also doesn’t agree with Cabot coach Mike Mal-ham’s assertion that he has one of the shallowest depth charts in years.
“They look to me like they have a lot more depth than they have had in a long time,” Russell said. “They have two units that looked really good. They have speed on both sides of the ball, and they look like a physical football team. It’s going to take 48 minutes of playing as hard as we can to be successful.”
Jacksonville did not play a preseason scrimmage game against another opponent, and Cabot coaches didn’t go to their Red-White game last Saturday.
Malham felt like he needed to focus on getting his own team better.
“We just have to get our situation straightened out,” Malham said. “We’ve got this new set that changes the blocking up a little bit when we split one out.
“Jacksonville always has good speed and I’m hearing they’ve got more than usual this year. We’re going to have to slow that down. If they score a lot of points we’re going to be in trouble.”
It was primarily Jacksonville’s decision to end the series. Malham said he enjoyed the game itself and would have continued, but admitted that it adds some pressure for his players.
“Well you start off with a 5A team and you lose to them, then your kids look at the schedule and there’s nothing but 7A teams left, it can kind of give you a bad outlook,” Malham said. “So it’s important for us to get a win here. But I don’t think it’s going to be an easy game. It’s the last one, at least for a little while, and they’re going to come in here with guns a blazing. I don’t know how long they’ll be gone though. If they get their school district we’ll probably be right back in there with them.”
As the underdog every year, it’s easy for the Red Devils to get fired up for the game with Cabot. But Cabot still circles this game as well.
“Oh definitely, you have to beat Jacksonville,” said Cabot senior fullback Zach Launius. “Every year you have to beat Jacksonville and you have to beat Conway. So yea, this is a big game.”
