If Turner loses to JI Burton this year that puts us in . . .

[lpd_observer]

third place in the district. Additionally, Central is looking more formidable after winning against Lee Co and is not an automatic win. I'm not really confident in this body of work to this point. Losing to a down Clintwood team was absolutely disasterous and unacceptable. Both Powell Valley and Appalachia spent the last several years building to this point, talentwise and anything less than an LPD championship and a 3 deep playoff run is not cutting the mustard. Several points to make on this subject:

1) Barker is a 1 in 8 year back. He's powerful and talented. We lose him after this season, thus making competitiveness all the more difficult to establish this last year.
2) We lose Orr on the offensive line who is the most dominant offensive lineman.
3) We'll have to break in a new quarterback as Huff (a four year starter) will also be gone.
4) This offense we run makes it much more difficult to establish a power running game. We need to get the power I back and give Barker and Davis lead blockers.
5) Not only did we lose but we blew away a twenty point lead . . . a twenty point lead! Totally unacceptable and should not happen. This means that we made no adjustments at halftime. Mullins absolutely and completely outcoached us to get his troops back into the game in the second half to score about 24 unanswered points. And did I mention that we had twice the talent of this clintwood team?

As hard as our remaining schedule is, I see possible losses against Sullivan North, Burton, Gate City. Next year with the loss of talent that we're about to experience, the best I see is a 3-7 to 4-6 kinda season. We, a school with 650 kids, just lost to a school with 290 kids who fielded the worst team they've had in probably 5 or 6 seasons.

We are fundamentally unsound in some really problematic areas, and it's starting to show. I'll be interested to see which team shows up against North. With all our talent, anything less than an 8-2 overall record and an undefeated LPD record is unacceptable.