After two very unfriendly weeks on the road, and collecting two losses, the Petal Panthers are finally playing at home. Petal traveled to Hattiesburg and Gulfport in the first two weeks and took two tough losses, but it hopes it can get back on track this week against Brother Martin of New Orleans.
Petal traveled to New Orleans last season and took down the Crusaders, 40-14.
“Hopefully it’ll be a little friendly to us,” Petal head coach Marcus Boyles said of playing in front of the home fans.
While Petal has played two games, Louisiana doesn’t get its season started until this week, so this is Brother Martin’s first game. It did play a two-quarter jamboree last week, but it’s still hard to determine what kind of team the Crusaders are when watching the film, according to Boyles.
“It is tough, especially when you only have two quarters and the team they played did a lot of different things offensively,” It was really hard to determine what they want to do on defense. It’s really tough in two quarters to determine what they really are on offense. It puts a little bit behind, but that’s OK. We’ll work through it and make it work.”
Boyles believes Brother Martin will look similar to what it did last season. The Crusaders will use an H-back. They’ll run some inside zone and power run plays, then they’ll have run-pass options built into those plays.
The Petal offense, however, still has to find its footing. It did score 28 points in the loss to Gulfport last week, but there are still obvious issues Petal needs to clean up in the passing game.
All Boyles knows to do is continue to work on the issues in practice because it’s working throughout the week leading up to the game. But, different variables cause the offense to scuffle when the lights come on Friday night. From dropped passes, overthrows and pressure from the defense, it’s been one thing after another.
“You see it in practice working really well,” Boyles said. “We think it’s going to work, we know it’s going to work, but it’s not happening quite as fast as the coaching staff or the team want to see it happen.”
The struggles on offense meant the defense stayed on the field way too much last week, too. The Panthers only allowed seven points in the first half, but Gulfport’s offense wore them down in the second half.
“Really and truly, I know we gave up some points in the second half, but we really did play well on defense,” Boyles said. “We played a bunch of snaps on defense because we really struggled on offense this week and left our defense on the field too much. We just really struggled offensively this week.”
Defensively, Brother Martin runs a 3-4, like it did last season, and it’ll bring pressure from different areas while rolling coverage.
“We’ll have to do a good job of recognizing the different coverages and what they’re trying to do,” Boyles said.
