Golden Tigers take beating
By Brannon King for the FCT
The 2017 football regular season kicked off Friday night for Russellville at Deshler, and the Golden Tigers came up short by a 35-3 score.
The win by Deshler snapped a three-game losing streak to RHS and was the second win of the season for the Tigers of Tuscumbia, which matches their win total of the entire 2016 season.
Russellville got off to a strong start after taking the opening kickoff and marching down the field, nicely mixing running plays with the occasional pass. After overcoming a holding penalty on the possession, Russellville got all the way down to the DHS 2 yardline on a Robert Hamilton run on a third-and-19 carry. However, the Golden Tigers weren’t able to get into the end zone, and Samuel Bahena was called upon to kick a 24-yard field goal to end the scoring drive that lasted for more than half of the first quarter. Bahena’s kick gave RHS the early 3-0 lead.
The Russellville defense also started the contest with good effort; they were able to put an end to Deshler’s first drive when Brooks Scott recovered a Deshler fumble after a passing play was completed on third down and long. RHS held the 3-0 lead until the second quarter, when the Tigers took the lead for good. Deshler quarterback Channing Marmann connected with Hayden Stutts deep in the back of the end zone behind a couple of RHS defenders on fourth-and-goal. The try for a two-point conversion failed, but Deshler led 6-3.
The second Deshler scoring drive started with great field position after a short RHS punt from deep in the Golden Tigers’ territory. It only took the Tigers three plays to grow the lead to 12-3. Russellville made a scoring bid just before the half, but an interception stopped the drive.
The second half was all Deshler as a lack of depth showed for Russellville. The Golden Tigers were also faced with the tough task of playing without standout Devin Buckhalter. The junior suffered a bone fracture in his foot in the jamboree game against Athens and will be sidelined for a few weeks.
“We came out of the gate and played great football early,” Russellville head coach Mark Heaton said. “The game wore on us a lot in the second half, and we ran out of a little bit of steam. We’ve got to find a way to play through some of that and find ourselves in a better situation in the third and fourth quarters.”
Heaton said he was pleased with how hard his team played in the game and will work to find ways to get through some depth issues and some execution mistakes that are costly against tough competition. “Again, we had some execution errors there late, and we’ve got to find a way to get some guys rested,” Heaton said. “Right now, we don’t have much depth, so we’ve got to build that depth in a hurry so we can be a little bit fresher in the third and fourth quarter.”
Deshler scoring plays in the second half came on a 56-yard quarterback run by Marmann, a 50-yard pass to Stutts from Marmann in the third quarter and a fourth quarter 17-yard TD run by Marmann with the extra-point kick coming with 10:32 remaining in the game.
Russellville will open Class 5A Region 8 play Friday night in Huntsville against the Lee High Generals.
