Published: October 22, 2007 10:45 pm         

South Laurel’s win over Mercer County puts an end to Warriors’ 12-year playoff streak

Somerset — For the first time in almost 12 years, Southwestern will not make it into the high school football post-season playoffs.

While the Warriors (2-6, 1-3) were on an bye-week, their playoff outlook seemed rather bright.

They just needed Mercer County to beat South Laurel on Friday. The Titans are the defending Class AA state champs and, according to Cantrell Ratings, were a 21-point favorite over South Laurel.

However, non of that mattered as South Laurel upset Mercer County 52-48, which put Mercer, South Laurel and Southwestern in a three-way tie in Class AAAAA District 7 play.

A tiebreaker was needed to determine the third and fourth seeds for the district playoffs to be played Nov. 9 through Nov. 16.

Since each team split wins over each other — Southwestern beat South Laurel and loss to Mercer County — a point system was used to break the tie.

Simply stated, the tiebreaker allows each team to earn one point for each win of four of their defeated opponents (excluding the teams involved in the tiebreaker).

The tiebreaker system turned out to be bad news for the Southwestern faithful.

“As soon as South Laurel beat Mercer County, I knew right then that we had been eliminated by the tiebreaker,” Southwestern coach Dale Anderson said. “We needed another win to give us a chance in the tiebreaker.”

“Our lost to Lincoln County cost us a lot players in injuries,” Anderson said. “We lost our starting quarterback (T.T. Wooldridge) for our next game, which was Mercer County and they beat us.”

“When you have a lot of injuries, you can’t expect to beat good teams,” Anderson said.

Although, the Warriors have two more games on their schedule that count towards the tiebreaker, the most points they could hope to gain is 8 points. South Laurel is sitting on 11 points right now and Mercer County has 10points.

“We still like our team and we still have two more games to play to finish out the season,” Anderson said. “The last two games will be for pride and we will see how our kids handle that.”

Warrior pride hit an all-time high last season as Southwestern played in their first-ever regional championship game, they won their fourth district title and downed former five-time state champs Boyle County twice in the 2006 season.

Ironically, Boyle County, who has only 2 wins this season, is the Warriors’ next opponent. George Rogers Clark, who has only one win this season, will be the Warriors’ last game of the season.

Across town, Pulaski is locked into the the number two seed with a 3-1 record. However, they have to wait to the last week of the regular season to see who will be their opponent in the district playoffs.

“We knew when the season started that this was going to be a great district,” Pulaski coach Johnny Hines said. “And when a strong team like Southwestern is eliminated from the playoffs, that shows how strong this district really is.”

Although, South Laurel has a slight one-point lead over Mercer in the tiebreaker, the Cardinals still have two games to play against teams that have a combined total of 11 wins, at the moment. Mercer has only one more game left with a opponent that has four wins.

If South Laurel can pull out one more win, they should earn the number three seed and play Pulaski in the district playoff opener.

“We would have liked it if we knew our district playoff opponent right now, but there is a good chance that we will not know for sure until the last week of the season,” Hines said.

Despite the disheartening news of his team’s elimination from the playoffs, Anderson likes the competitiveness of the newly formed football district.

“This is a great district,” Anderson said. “All five teams are competitive and all the coaches in this district get along with each other.”

•••

There is no question marks or wondering about Somerset’s Class AAA District 5 playoff outlook.

For the third-year in a row, Somerset (6-2, 5-0) has went unbeaten in district play and for the third straight year earned the number one seed, which will match the Jumpers against four-seed Taylor County (3-5, 2-3).

Garrard County and Wayne County will play in the opposite bracket.

     

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