Football Week 15

Ok, I'm about a week behind, so this is from last week, this week's stuff will be posted later. This week was the state quarterfinals for Division II schools in Texas. In Texas they have two divisions that they give football state championships in football. Basically, each class (Class A-5A) give two state championships, I'm pretty sure it's a money thing and there are plenty of people that don't like it, but that's not my call, nor do I really care. Heck, I kind of like it, it doubles my chances of prolonging my football season. Plus, what system is perfect... hell, it's still better than the BCS.

So, this week I went to Mineral Wells on Friday night to shoot Albany playing against Archer City in the Class A Div. II state quarterfinals. This game was predicted to be a dog fight, and that's just what it was. Archer City was a bunch of beasts, they had huge lines on both sides of the ball, and like Albany, they played smash-mouth, shove it up the gut football. Nothing too pretty, and on defense it was the same way. Both teams spent most of the night beating on each other. It was typical 3-yards and a cloud of dust (if you could get clouds of dust on artificial turf). If it was 4 down and anything less than three yards, I think both teams went for it. For one, Class A football isn't exactly known for great special teams. Two, neither defense could stuff the short run all night.

Archer City ended up making one mistake, a fumble which Albany returned to the Archer 5-yard line, which Albany ran in for a touchdown a couple plays later to go up 14-7. They then had a chance to ice the game with a 35-yard field goal. The quarterback, who is also their kicker just missed it, bouncing it off the upright. Archer put up a good fight at the end, using the hook-and-latter and a couple other trick plays, but they were stopped on a fourth down with less than a minute left.

Instead of leaving the long glass on my camera for the last drive, I switched to my wide angle lens. I made sure to be near the QB/Kicker (above) on the last drive since I figured he was going to be the most excited about the stop (or the most upset if they didn't). One of the great things about high school football is being allowed in the team area, which allowed me to do this. My thinking was I had plenty of action shots from the game and my chances of getting great reaction was going to be better, than hoping to get something better then the action I already had, and it paid off.

Saturday, I went and shot Cisco against Idalou in the Class 2A Div. II state quarterfinals in Snyder. There's only one photo (above) on here from that game. I spent most of the night out of place, or on the wrong side of the field. It happens. Cisco ended up winning the game. It was pretty close until the fourth quarter and Idalou just sort of fell apart.