Spartans Offensive and Defensive Lines Dominate Region Championship
The region championship game was billed as speed against speed between the Spartans of South Warren and Blue Tornadoes of Paducah Tilghman. The football prognosticators and nameless message nay Sayers favored Paducah Tilghman while discounting the 12-0 Spartans record based on a soft schedule.
For those who had watched the Spartans throughout the season understood that this team was 12-0 because of the way they play their games and not because of who they played. In other words, they played Paducah Tilghman with the same intensity as they did against Warren East, Elizabethtown , Adair County or any other team they faced .
The offense and defensive lines get the game ball! The offensive line created huge openings for Litten, McElwain and Namvong to run through.
Defensively the Spartans front line smothered Tighman all night, not allowing them to get any kind of offensive rhythm. The Blue Tornadoes had no answer for the explosive line play on either side of the ball.
No matter what happens next weekend, 2014 will go down as a historic one for the South Warren Spartans, who won the school’s first ever regional championship with a 36-0 demolishing of the Paducah Tilghman Blue Tornado, in a rematch of last year’s regional final.
The first half was a close one, and was a 7-0 Spartan lead with less than two minutes to play. With the Blue Tornado driving deep in South territory, PTHS quarterback Jessie Dunigan rolled to his left and threw a pass looking for a touchdown, but instead it found the hands of Spartan defensive back Austin McElwain, who in turned flipped the field and would then run it into the end zone for a South Warren score out of the Wildcat formation.
The Spartans took a 14-0 halftime lead, and came out firing on all cylinders in the second half, scoring on each of their first three possessions of the half, and later recovering a Tornado fumble in their end zone to get out to a 34-0 lead. The Spartans successfully went for two points to put the game in a running clock, and that’s where it’d hold for the remainder of the evening.
South Warren is now one of four teams left in the 3A playoffs, and will travel to Louisville Central next weekend to look to punch their ticket to the 3A championship game.
