I am really removed from the team so not a lot to offer. The seniors that left last year were some of the best kids to ever come thru the program. JV teams lost 1 game the last 2 years so I would expect some decent talent in the pipeline. Unkown will be a keyword for this years team to start the season. Props to the coaching staff for a sig. upgrade on the occ sched. as it won't take long to find out what we got. If I had to guess the year will start off slowly & build as the season progresses. As always with smaller div teams, avoiding injuries are critical!
One thing worth noting is that even though we graduated a great deal of starters, our many games with a large margin of victory last year enabled many of this years newcomers to get quite a bit of experience. This will be the second year in a row that we start the season with five new starters on offensive line. Last year when we had five new starters on offensive line they looked like they were all experienced veterans from the first game on. Hopefully this year will be the same way.
We couldn't have picked a tougher opponent on week one, but I wish this was the out of conference schedule we had been playing for several years. Even if we pick up a couple of losses, this schedule will help Franklin tremendously later in the year as long as we avoid injuries, like BiltmoreCANE said.
I fully expect Franklin to give Asheville all they want and more. I think Asheville is the better team but Asheville typically plays very sloppy the first couple games of the season.
Franklin will definitely hit you, no doubt about that. It wouldn't surprise me to see this be a ball game in a couple weeks, I hope I'm wrong. Franklin is well coached, hard nosed and usually pretty big. Asheville will be way way faster, probably bigger too. Like ahsdynasy said though, we always suck in the first couple games. What's the qb situation looking like over in Macon county?
Actually this year we may not be way faster. This is a big Asheville team with decent speed, last years team though was far superior in the speed department. I still don't think if Franklin breaks a run there will be any problem running them down, but you never know.
We don't have the breakaway speedsters like Ray, Paulk, and Jave from last season but we will still have good team speed, especially at linebacker and in the secondary.
Don't think it's a case of being secretive but as I said more of the unknown. Look any realistic Panther fan would have to be satisfied if we can keep the game close. My thinking is a win is unlikely but a loss by 10 points or less and I'm ok with it at this stage of the season. More important to me than scoreboard numbers are that we stay healthy & learn from the game.