SACCO: Defense awakens

LEXINGTON

We’re pencil-neck pen pushers. Searching high and low for any reason to throw a shadow of a doubt upon R.E. Lee coach David Tibbs and his Fighting Leemen football team.

We’ll be the first to call them out when dumb penalties cost them a win. We’re the first to let the whole world (or at least all of Augusta County) know that the glaring weakness on this team was the defense.

That’s what happens when you watch Dae’ Quan Scott look like a hare in a tortoise race. That’s what happens when you watch mental breakdowns turn into big-game losses.

Yeah, that’s football life in Staunton when you open the pages of whichever local sports section you read and see, “Lee’s defense exposed yet again,” or “Penalties send Lee home early.”

So we quill-dippers will call Lee’s 26-6 win over Rockbridge less a football game and more a long-distance trip to Bizarro world. Where up is black and east is down. Where dogs and cats live together in perfect harmony.

But Tibbs, standing under a steady blanket of mist in Lexington, will just call it the status quo. He’ll call his whole team together and express his love for his guys.

“In 22 years,” he told them, “I’ve never been this proud of a football team.”

His reasons were many and justified.

That maligned defense made open-field tackles with ease. They made an explosive Rockbridge offense look like a Pop Warner team. They did it all.

In a game that would give Lee its second straight Southern Valley title, it was the most un-Lee-like of wins.

Those quick, long scoring runs replaced by a 21-play drive that ate 11:07 off the clock gave the Leemen a 14-0 lead in the second quarter and stabbed the Wildcats right in their football hearts.

It happened on the defensive side of the ball.

It happened with a super sophomore at quarterback.

It happened with another sophomore – Mark Anderson — at running back.

Most mind-boggling of all, it happened with Scott walking along the sideline, a bag full of ice strapped to his left shoulder after he came up hurting on the Leemen’s third play from scrimmage.

Scott still managed to give Lee all the points it would need, taking the opening kickoff 78 yards straight up the middle without a single Wildcat putting a paw on the magic man.

But it was sophomore quarterback Devante White who sealed the deal.

It was the defense keeping Rockbridge out of the end zone.

“The much maligned defense,” Tibbs said through the expected bout of nausea such a statement probably brings about in his gut. “They pitched a shutout tonight.”

Tibbs took the blame for the Wildcats’ lone score, a 69-yard interception return by Jaqwan Biggs.

After screaming, “They said we couldn’t play in the rain,” Tibbs pushed defensive captains Kameron Coverstone and Dwight Godwin toward the notepads and tape recorders.

“I’d love for you guys to interview me all night,” Tibbs said. “But I want you guys to interview these guys right here. Much maligned? They deserve all the credit.”

Much maligned by the media indeed. Which is why Godwin and Coverstone didn’t smile when they were put on the spot, opting instead to turn an interview into a stare down reminiscent of a heavyweight-bout weigh-in.

“We’ve been hearing it all year,” Godwin said. “The defense is giving up drives. When Dae’ Quan went out, we wanted to step it up more.”

Coverstone, still waiting for the media to blink, nodded his head. The open-field tackles, he said, came because of the pursuit drills they work on every day.

“Every single day,” he said, nodding his head.

Let us break out the microscope and search all we want. Simon Cowell couldn’t find anything wrong with this district championship sonata put on by the Leemen.

“You guys are the undefeated 2008 South Valley District champions,” Tibbs told his team before they broke for the bus.

Actually, coach Tibbs, it’s the Southern Valley. But hey, that’s just us being nit-picky.

You, and your team, are used to that.