CENTRAL 24, EASTSIDE 23: NOW THAT’S FOOTBALL!

NORTON, VA — Now here's the thing about football. You can spend all week drawing plays on a board. You can put arrows here, circles there, have a guy motion this way and another guy run that way. But eventually somebody has to block somebody, somebody has to tackle somebody, and for crying out loud, somebody has to hold on to the football!

Friday night at Tommy McAmis Field, Wise County Central and Eastside gave us just about everything you'd want from a high school football game. Central jumped ahead, Eastside made mistakes, Central made them pay, and then the Spartans got back up and came after them. The Warriors stretched the lead to 24-7 before Eastside came roaring back to 24-23 and threatened to win the whole darn thing.

Central's defense finally made one last stand to preserve a 24-23 victory.

BOOM! That's football.

💥 NINE SECONDS INTO THE SEASON

Central kicked off and Eastside started at its own 35. On the first play from scrimmage, the football came loose and Colton Elkins scooped it up and ran 35 yards for a touchdown. Nine seconds had come off the clock.

Now, when you're a coach, you spend months preparing for the opening game. You've got practices, scrimmages, meetings and film sessions until your wife starts wondering whether you still live there. Then the season starts and nine seconds later you're either celebrating a touchdown or standing on the sideline wondering where the football went.

Cole Duncan kicked the extra point, Central led 7-0, and you couldn't have drawn up a better beginning for new Warriors coach Kevin Saunders.

Eastside didn't go 12-1 last season by folding every time something went wrong. Quarterback Landon Pannell answered with a 17-yard touchdown run early in the second quarter, tying the game at 7-7 and seemingly putting things back where everybody expected them.

That's when Central did something I really like.

They ran the football.

🏈 FIVE PLAYS? FIVE PLAYS ARE PLENTY

Central put together an eight-minute drive, leaning on its offensive line before Elkins finished it with a seven-yard touchdown run. Saunders explained the offensive philosophy afterward about as simply as a coach possibly could.

“We're not going to be fancy.”

I love that! Everybody thinks football has to be complicated. Sometimes you just line up and tell the other team, “Here's where we're going. Try to stop us.”

Saunders said Central basically had five plays it could run Friday night. Five! You don't need 75 plays if five of them work. That's like Thanksgiving dinner. You don't need 75 different things on your plate. Give me turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy and one of those rolls and I'm good.

Actually, now that we're talking about food, Central's offense was kind of a football Turducken. You've got the offensive line opening the hole, Elkins carrying the football inside that, and Saunders calling one of those five plays inside the whole thing. Somehow you pull it out of the oven and Elkins has 164 rushing yards.

See? Football and Turducken. Same basic principle.

🦵 AND THEN THE SOCCER GUY SHOWS UP

Central recovered a squib kick late in the second quarter and suddenly had another opportunity before halftime. Only 24 seconds remained, which brought Duncan back onto the field.

Duncan is a soccer player who handles kicking duties for Central, and this time he lined up for the first field-goal attempt of his football career.

Thirty yards.

Good.

Central went to halftime leading 17-7, and that's one of the things I love about high school football. You need a kicker, so you go find the soccer guy. Then the soccer guy comes out in his first game, knocks through a 30-yard field goal and trots back to the sideline like that's what he does every Friday night.

BOOM! You've got yourself a kicker.

💪 COLTON ELKINS WASN'T FINISHED

Central came out in the third quarter and kept feeding Elkins. Why wouldn't you? If a guy keeps running through people, you don't take the ball away from him. You give it to him again.

Elkins broke loose for a 36-yard touchdown, putting Central ahead 24-7. He finished with 164 yards on 25 carries, two rushing touchdowns and that 35-yard defensive touchdown on Eastside's first play.

That's three touchdowns, offense and defense. The only thing the kid didn't do Friday night was sell popcorn at halftime.

But at 24-7, this game wasn't over.

Not even close.

🟢 HERE COME THE SPARTANS

Eastside had made enough mistakes to lose two football games. Coach Mike Rhodes counted five major miscues, including turnovers and special-teams mistakes, and the Spartans were also playing without Keldan Hamilton and Landry Carico, two important players and team leaders.

Here's something else about football, though. Good teams don't always play good football. Sometimes good teams play badly and still keep fighting.

That's exactly what Eastside did.

Rocky Bond started finding room in the second half and finished with 118 yards on 13 carries, along with five receptions. Isaiah Barnette scored from three yards out to cut the Central lead to 24-15, and suddenly those Eastside folks in the stands had a little life again.

Then Pannell broke loose for another 17-yard touchdown run with 7:43 remaining. Eastside converted, and a game that had been 24-7 was suddenly 24-23.

Now, get out the telestrator because we've got ourselves a football game.

📺 CIRCLE THIS GUY, CIRCLE THAT GUY

Freeze it right here.

Central was coming off a season in which it won one game. Eastside had gone 12-1. The Warriors had built a 17-point lead, the Spartans had committed mistake after mistake, and somehow Eastside had fought all the way back to within one point and got another opportunity late.

This is where I'd get out the telestrator. Circle this guy, circle that guy, draw an arrow here and another one over there, then accidentally draw something that looks like a turkey.

But eventually I'd circle the most important thing on the screen.

Central's defense.

Eastside threatened late, but when the Warriors absolutely had to make a stop, they made it. That's how the Kevin Saunders era at Central began with a win.

🤝 BOTH TEAMS DESERVE SOME LOVE

Central earned every bit of this victory. The Warriors played physical football, controlled the clock, ran behind their offensive line, capitalized on Eastside's mistakes and made the defensive stop they absolutely had to make. Saunders wasn't interested in taking much credit afterward, saying, “I just put them in the right place.”

That's a coach talking, but his players certainly looked like they were in the right places Friday night.

And how about Eastside?

The Spartans could have folded when they fell behind 24-7. They didn't. They could have used the absence of Hamilton and Carico as an excuse. They didn't do that either. Rhodes took responsibility for the mistakes, and his football team kept playing until there wasn't any time left to play.

Sometimes that's what a good football team looks like on a bad night.

Central fans should celebrate this one. Their Warriors just knocked off a heavily favored opponent and matched their entire 2025 win total on opening night. Eastside fans can be disappointed with the mistakes while still being mighty proud of a team that nearly erased a 17-point deficit.

🏆 THE MADDEN GAME BALL

You can't leave this one without giving out a game ball, and Colton Elkins makes that decision pretty easy: 164 rushing yards, two rushing touchdowns and one defensive touchdown.

But I'm giving another game ball to everybody who bought a ticket.

Because you got your money's worth.

You got an underdog. You got a favorite. You got a touchdown nine seconds into the season, an eight-minute drive, a soccer player kicking his first field goal, a 17-point lead, five costly mistakes, a furious comeback and a game that came down to one final defensive stand.

That's what high school football is supposed to give you. Two neighboring teams, a Friday night, momentum swinging back and forth and one point separating them when it was all over.

Central gets the celebration.

Eastside gets the film room and a chance to fix what went wrong.

The rest of us get to say we watched one heck of a football game.

CENTRAL 24, EASTSIDE 23. BOOM! NOW THAT’S FOOTBALL!

🏈 Friday Night Holler Football Reports
Big hits. Big plays. Small-town football. And just enough foolishness to keep Friday night interesting.