by Kirk Dooley
The 2016 playoffs are upon us and on Saturday HP fans will zip up the Tollway to watch the Scots take on the Mount Pleasant Tigers at 1:00 p.m. at the Ford Center at the Star, better known as the new Dallas Cowboys’ 12,000-seat indoor practice facility in Frisco. All the Frisco ISD high school teams use the state-of-the-art stadium for games throughout the season and it has become a popular playoff facility … as of this weekend. 
The district 15-5A co-champions and number-one-playoff-seed Scots will face the Tigers, who finished fourth in district 16-5A. While the Tigers’ 3-7 record is not as good as the Scots’ 8-2 season total, Mount Pleasant’s winning streak is a two, while HP’s is zero. Therein lies one of the key aspects of the Texas high school football playoffs. Throw the records out the window. Forget the standings. Rankings mean nothing. As the great philosopher Randy Allen says, “A playoff team is a playoff team.”
Any team with any record can beat any other team in the playoffs. Right now the Tigers are playing their best football of the season and they believe that they will win their third straight game this weekend.
The Scots took a week off from a very good season and let the Wylie East Raiders beat them up in the final game of the regular season. It was the first time a Wylie ISD team has ever beaten Highland Park. To me the game boiled down to the Raiders’ final drive of the game, which took nine minutes off the clock and culminated with an Eno Benjamin 11-yard touchdown run with 80 grains of sand left in the hourglass. Final score: Wylie East 20 – HP 9.
The Scots vow to bounce back this week and play at the level that put them in the state’s Top 10. On paper HP should run circles around a 3-7 team but the Scots are facing an offensive line that goes 260, 270, 295, 305 and 310. That’s a lot of East Texas beef leading an offense that is coming into its own with a sophomore quarterback and a sophomore running back. They’re both now playing like veterans as the playoffs begin.
This season the Tigers boasted one of the best running backs in North Texas, a kid who gained over 1,900 yards as a junior. But he became unavailable in August and the Tigers are just now recovering from his loss.
The Scots will wake up from last Friday’s slumber party in Wylie. They should have their heads on straight and take their frustrations out on the Tigers, who are thrilled just to make the playoffs.
If the Scots take care of business, next week they will play the winner of this Friday evening’s Frisco Independence-McKinney North game at the Ford Center at the Star. Both of these teams will come armed with a 2,000-yard runner of their own. Hopefully the Wylie East game, in which the Scots held Eno Benjamin to 186 yards (that’s below his average), will serve as a practice game to prepare the Scots defense for Independence’s Dom Williams or McKinney North’s Lamar Lucas. Both of these guys have gained more yards rushing than Benjamin.
But to get to that game, the Scots must do better than field goals against Mount Pleasant.