For one week, Paul Murphy is going back to college.
At least, that’s the approach Waubonsie Valley’s football coach, a former assistant at North Central College, is taking in regards to his team’s trip to Edwardsville.
The 30th-seeded Warriors will make the long trek to open the Class 8A postseason on Saturday opposite the third-seeded Tigers with designs on trying to pull a surprise.
“I’m going to treat it like we’re going to a bowl game, like you’re in college,” Murphy said. “First time in my career we’ve ever taken a long trip. I think the longest trip I’ve taken prior to that when I was at Marmion we went to Princeton. So for us to go down to Edwardsville – it’s a 4 ½, five-hour bus ride.
“We’ll charter some buses, we’ll do it right, we’ll treat the kids like they’re in college and we’ll get ready. We’ll have a great week of practice and we’ll go and play a game and see how much being in the DVC helped us coming into the playoffs.”
Waubonsie Valley (5-4) heads into the postseason on a two-game losing streak after dropping games to Naperville North and Wheaton North.
For them to get back to the success that saw them pin the only loss on Naperville Central and be the last team to beat Glenbard North, getting Max Ihry back on track is imperative.
Ihry, who enters the postseason with 908 rushing yards and 10 TDs, has been held to a combined 111 yards the last two weeks.
Rodney Gee’s return to the backfield, coupled with the versatile dimension sophomore Tanner Westwood offers, will look to give Ihry and quarterback Jack Connolly some help.
Connolly has 1,018 total yards and 10 touchdowns as he continues to get more and more comfortable with the triple option, according to Murphy.
“Option is a type of offense – the more reps you get, the easier it is to run,” Murphy said. “(Connolly) has had plenty of practice speed reps. He’s also had plenty of game speed reps, which game speed reps are a whole lot different from practice speed reps.”
Edwardsville (9-0) has won nine games for the fourth time in five seasons under coach Matt Martin, including two double-digit-winning seasons in 2012 and 2013.
Despite only playing in six games for the Tigers, quarterback Riley Jones has accounted for 862 total yards and nine touchdowns while junior Brendan Dickman has also seen significant time under center.
Jones and Dickman have combined to lead the Edwardsville offense to an average of 31.7 points a game, which included a 1-0 forfeit victory over East St. Louis on Oct. 2 because of a teachers’ strike.
Two senior running backs, Jackson Morrissey and Kendell Davis, have combined for 1,041 yards and 18 touchdowns.
“Their No. 1 quarterback got hurt about game five or six with a sprained ankle, so I think he’s their big gun,” Murphy said of Jones. “But we only got to see him for part of the game on one game film we took. On the other game film he’s not even playing. I read an article that they’re hopeful he’ll be ready for the playoffs, but they wouldn’t make any commitment that he would be. Obviously we saw a little bit of him on one film and didn’t see him at all on the other one.
“Their running backs are pretty quick and they’ve got some pretty speedy receivers. They play about five or six guys both ways. They play more guys both ways than we do, so those guys that are going to play on offense are also going to play on defense. So one way to wear them down offensively is we want to control the ball and pound on them and wear them down, so they don’t play offense.”
That task will fall to Connolly, Ihry, Gee and Westwood.
Gee’s 10 carries for 22 yards against the Falcons marked his first time carrying the ball at least 10 times since Week 1 against Lake Park and his return adds another weapon to the triple option.
How will being in the DuPage Valley Conference benefit Waubonsie Valley moving forward?
That answer may rely in the looks Connolly has had to look at throughout the entire year.
“When you get a 3-4 team – unless they change their front – we got a pretty good idea how they’re going to play the option because it’s a 3-4 with either a Cover 2 or Cover 4 zone, whatever you want to call,” Murphy said. “So there’s only so many things you can do with that. If they want to break their formation and be different, then they can give us a different wrinkle. But I don’t think it’s going to be anything that we already haven’t seen from the DVC coaches.
“I saw stuff from the DVC coaches this year that – in the option game – I hadn’t seen from any Upstate Eight coaches, I hadn’t seen from my days at Marmion. These guys are creative and they came up with ways to try to defend the option, which obviously keeps us on our toes and forces us to come up with answers and we came up with some answers.
“So if we see those kind of looks from them, it shouldn’t be a shock to our system because we’ve seen it all year in the DVC, guys doing different things to try and take away the option game.”
