The Weatherford Kangaroos come back from their bye-week ready to build off their one-sided homecoming win.
The Roos (3-2, 1-1) travel to play Arlington Lamar (3-2, 1-1) at 7 p.m. Friday, Oct. 9, at Maverick Stadium at the University of Texas at Arlington.
The game could show what the team’s playoff chances are. The Vikings have both a 10-point win against Arlington and an overtime loss against Arlington Bowie to start district.
The gameplan to defeat Lamar starts with stopping running back Tayrone Thomas. While not the biggest or the fastest player on the field, he carries the biggest burden having carried the ball 25 or more times in four of the five games this season. Thomas has rushed for 1,007 yards and eight touchdowns midway through the season.
When he has a huge game (408 yards and three touchdowns against Arlington), the Vikings have won. When he’s only put up average stats (74 yards one touchdown against Little Elm), Lamar has lost.
“The offense centers around him; he’s a very good player,” Weatherford coach Marshall Williams said. “He is the focal point.”
In the Roos’ losses against Burleson Centennial and Arlington Martin, the opponents have rushed for more than 200 yards. The game plan really all could come down to stopping Thomas.
The reason so much of the offense revolves around Thomas is because quarterback Brian Williams is just a sophomore. His passing stats are modest, (649 yards, 6 touchdowns, 2 interceptions) and he’s the team’s second-leading rusher with 275 yards and three touchdowns, giving defenses another person to worry about on read-option plays.
Still, Weatherford has to try to make Williams show his inexperience when the Vikings choose to pass.
“I’ve coached against sophomore quarterbacks before,” Williams said. “They struggle until they don’t struggle. He’s a good athlete with a good arm. Young quarterbacks don’t really like anything around their feet or face so we have to make sure we disrupt his schedule on every play and make him do sophomore things.”
Defensively, the Vikings play with four down lineman that have racked up 21 sacks. Isaiah Boins has proven to be disruptive all season playing at defensive end, being third in tackles and first in both sacks and tackles for loss.
Following the big win the Roos are coming from, Williams has hopes they can continue to build on some positive strides he was seeing from his offense.
“I’d like to spread the ball around more,” Williams said. “We did a pretty good job of it last game, and I want to continue to do that. I don’t want it to be where if teams shut down Number 5 (Jakob Hemphill) or Number 0 (D.J. Quimby) there is nothing we can do. We have to be able to rely on other people to do it. We have shown flashes of that before last game, and I think we need to build on that.”
While Weatherford had two weeks to get ready for the game, the Vikings also had two weeks, with the whole district taking off last week. Williams did not want to get too “lost in the sauce” with an extra week to prepare and half a season worth of film to peruse.
“You’ve got these five videos to look at and all this time to prepare and next thing you know you are doing too much instead of working on getting better at what you do,” Williams said. “I think we did a good job of giving the team a bit of a break before slowly introducing the game plan to the team.”
Another different thing to throw into this week’s preparation is Weatherford having no school this week with it being fall break. Despite that wrinkle, Williams has been impressed with his team’s focus in the first two days of practice this week.
“I’ll be honest, I’ve been really pleased with the outcome of our kids being here and getting quality work in,” Williams said.
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