Guest Posts on County 10 are provided by contributors and the opinions, thoughts, and comments within are their own and may not necessarily reflect those of County 10.
Dubois head football coach Dan O’Brien was working on a hunch last Saturday against Hanna Elk Mountain. He didn’t have any film on the Miners. Nothing on Hudl (a recruiting and scouting website), or anything shared online by the Hanna staff.
In the 2024 season, the Miners stacked their defense tightly into the box. In 6-man football, there isn’t really a box, but all six defenders were set in a goal-line style, short-yardage formation.
O’Brien and his Rams only ran twice inside the entire game with minimal results, but they rolled on the toss sweep, the wide counter and destroyed the Hanna defense via the play action pass.
Riverton head coach Mark Lenhardt is a master at scouting opponents. He prepares a team as well as anyone I’ve ever watched work. It was evident in last week’s not-so-surprising 28-0 win over Douglas.
Scouting an opponent always pays off. You’ll still hear the arrogant comment from a few coaches that (to quote) “We don’t worry about them. We just do what we do.” OK, you don’t worry about state championships much either.
In an age of ubiquitous video, online games in real-time, and the ever-present radio broadcast, the era of in-person scouting has largely come to an end. In its day, scouting was often the difference between a good season and a great season, and at other times, the equally important separation from a good effort or an embarrassment.
The 1981 season was a memorable one for the Lusk Tigers. It was the first state football championship the red and white team from tiny Niobrara County had ever won on the field. They had a couple of polling titles in 1962 and 63 when they rolled to 9-0 and 8-0-1 seasons over the likes of Gillette, Torrington, Douglas, Wheatland, Newcastle and a bevy of South Dakota and Nebraska schools. There were no organized playoffs for the Tigers then.
In 1981, it was the real deal, a 9-1 effort that ended with a 21-0 win over the Pinedale Wranglers in the Class B championship game on Halloween Day.
In retrospect, I was a little miffed when head coach Jerry Fullmer told me I was going scouting in Pine Bluffs rather than coaching against Guernsey-Sunrise on Monday of the third week of the season.
As a 24-year old assistant coach, it was often “other duties” as assigned, and this one was a big duty. We knew Lingle-Ft. Laramie was loaded. The Doggers were ranked #1 in the statewide polling and rolled over their first two opponents.
Pine Bluffs rarely had a good 11-man football team, that changed once the Hornets moved to 9-man and became the power of the divisions. 1981 was no exception, the Hornets were in the middle of the Texas Trail Conference that season, but they did some different things that would expose Lingle’s defense and force them out of their familiar power-I offense.
So, off to Pine Bluffs I went after my last class on Friday. The late Mark Lohr, a local minister and huge Tiger football fan, drove the 141 miles to eastern Laramie County.
I found a perch high in the home stands to write notes and look for keys. I found one right away. After a kickoff, Lingle always went to their base 5-2 defense, without looking to the sidelines. They were wide open for the venerable “lonesome end” play.
The lonesome end was a trick play, a play that has since been erased by new rules. It unveils like this. After a kick return, you send your team to the line without a huddle. Just as the linemen get set, a final 11th player steps on the field, three yards off the sideline. The rest of the team packs in behind him so you can’t see the wide receiver all alone on the sideline.
We used 6-2 135-pound Shannon Bruegger as the lonesome end. Quarterback Troy Hladky took the snap, threw a high arching pass down the far sideline and Brugger ran under it. He was tackled at the four-yard line. We took a 7-0 lead and held on for a 14-8 upset of the previously top-ranked Doggers.
To add to the fun, quotes by Lingle head coach Roger Fus about how the Tigers were one-dimensional and how Hladky couldn’t throw the ball were plastered on the locker room wall all week. They appeared in both the Torrington Telegram and Scottsbluff Star-Herald adding a little incentive to the effort that Friday.
We made a lot of yardage that season on the option, slot-back counters out of the power-I and slot-back reverses out of the slot formation, but Lingle was well prepared for our style of running offense, they had scouted us too.
In scouting their 5-2 defense, I noticed the linebackers split wide outside the defensive tackles on second down. We ran inside power plays on second down all night the following week, playing ball control defense, in other words, keeping their offense off the field on long, clock-consuming drives.
Much to Fullmer’s chagrin (he hated the pass), Pine Bluffs was able to move the ball with short passes to the flat and inside counters. We threw more short passes that following week than the rest of the season combined, and worked long hours on inside counters, traps and power plays. It paid off.
They shut down our option, the wide counters, and off-tackle runs, but Kevin Ellis, our rangy fullback picked up sizeable gains running straight at their defense, and after a couple of dives, the counter to tailback Tony Gladson led to repeated first downs. It was one of the best games I ever coached. Fullmer was a great coach, but he was a master that night. A remarkable effort against a physically superior team.
Lingle finished the season running the score up on everyone else they played, but even with a 7-1 record, they stayed home for the playoffs.
In those days, only the conference champion moved on in the postseason.
Jump ahead a few years, and I was the head 7th-grade coach at Riverton Middle School. In those days, we were expected to scout a couple of games for the Wolverine varsity as part of our middle school coaching duties.
I ended up in Rawlins one night watching the Outlaws get destroyed by Rock Springs, a few weeks later, it was the battle of the Broncs as Sheridan rolled over a good Cody team.
Part of scouting was to check the veracity of the players size as listed in the program. Coaches are notorious liars when it comes to height and weight. Sheridan’s receivers were much taller than Cody’s defensive backs that year. The Sheridan kids were all listed at 6-0 to 6-2 in the program, but they towered over the Cody defenders who were listed at 5-11 to 6-1.
At halftime, I decided to wander onto the field just to check the Sheridan roster. It was a good move. Sheridan won 22-0. It probably didn’t make any difference the following week for the Riverton kids to know the Broncs’ receivers were really 6-5 and 6-7, not 6-0 and 6-2. Sheridan steamrolled Riverton 30-0 in head coach Lee Smith’s final season that following Friday.
No one could scout as well as Chuck Wells did for Harold Bailey back in the Shoshoni glory days. Chuck was so accurate, you could count on exact plays being run by opposing teams just via down and distance. He knew the tendencies of each opposing coach and transferred that knowledge to the Wrangler defense.
I caught the scouting fever even at the junior high level, making short trips to Pavillion, Ethete, and Thermopolis to pick up a few bits of knowledge to use in our Tuesday afternoon or Saturday morning tilts.
It’s a lost art, replaced by technology, but good coaches do their homework on the high-definition flat-screen these days, rather than in the dark, windy stands of some opposing field.
Pay attention to the scouting report and you’ll always get a surprise win or two.