East Prairie's Williams wins Carr

POPLAR BLUFF -- East Prairie senior running back M.C. Williams powered his way to the Carr Trophy with more than 24 carries per game this season in a conservative offensive set.

Make him an offensive coordinator for a day, though, and he admits he might get radical with the offense.

"The spread," Williams said. "The spread because it gives running backs more leeway to get into open space and make plays."

The selection of Williams as the top football player in the 16-team SEMO Conference, announced Wednesday night during the Poplar Bluff Letter Club's 63rd annual Gridiron Banquet, was a victory for the old-school style of football, which seems to be diminishing in an era of higher-scoring spread offenses.

"The new generation of football nowadays, people have gotten away from the double-tight, smash-mouth, 3-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust, and they went to the spread to get their athletes out in space, get them the ball quickly and let them make plays," East Prairie coach Jason Aycock said.

That's tempting with an athlete like Williams, who carried for 2,116 yards to lead Southeast Missouri. He averaged 8.64 yards per carry and scored 32 touchdowns as part of his area-best 226 points. Williams, a 5-foot-9, 185-pounder, had only six receptions, but he had five games when he carried more than 30 times and eight games when he racked up more than 200 yards rushing.

But, Aycock said, "Him getting the ball 30, 40 times a game in a spread offense probably wouldn't happen, but I'm not a spread coach, I'm a wing-T coach."

Farmington coach Todd Vaughn, who led his team to the SEMO North championship in its first year in the conference, likely is the league's spread expert. His team led Southeast Missouri in passing with more than 2,375 yards, along with having a 1,000-yard rusher en route to reaching the Class 4 quarterfinals.

The Knights had one of the other leading contenders for the Carr Trophy in senior receiver Bryan Krause, who scored a team-leading 18 touchdowns in a variety of ways. Like last year's recipient, Jackson's Matt Lang, Krause was a top defensive back (five interceptions, two returned for touchdowns) as well as receiver. And Krause also was a dangerous return man, with 20 kick returns for an average of 34.7 yards and three touchdowns and 34 punt returns for a 33.6 average.

But Farmington, which had an all-conference running back and another all-conference receiver, wasn't always focused on putting the ball in his hands. Krause had 35 catches in 13 games for 623 yards and nine touchdowns to go with 39 rushes for 309 yards and four touchdowns, which means he averaged only 5.7 touches per game offensively and averaged a TD per game.

"We started the season with the mindset that you have to act like he's not there," Vaughn said. "We have to develop an offense before we can just hand the ball or throw the ball to him. We did that at the beginning of the season to develop some other kids. At the end of the year, we found more ways to get him the ball, including lining him up at quarterback."

Krause, who played running back most of his football life, said he loved the offense and the passing game. Vaughn said the players enjoy the challenge of running the no-huddle spread, and it has lured some athletes who might not otherwise play football if they were limited to blocking rather than catching balls.

And Vaughn, whose team also had the all-conference quarterback and ran 62 percent of the time this year after a 50-50 split last year, wanted to have the potential for balance to take pressure off one player.

"If something happens to that young man, you're kind of lost in the wind and we don't want to be like that," Vaughn said.

New Madrid County Central coach Arlen Pixley said one of the things that can happen is a defense keys on that player in the playoffs. His spread offense utilized five offensive players for more than 5,400 yards of offense, including two 1,300-yard-plus rushers and a quarterback who had more than 1,600 total yards.

"It's all predicated on line play and what we can do up front," said Pixley, who took his team to the SEMO Central title and Class 3 quarterfinals. "We're obviously a run-first squad, and we try to carry that philosophy to the playoffs because you can run into some bad-weather games. Our philosophy is always going to be having the dimension of option football to kind of accent the extra blocker who is not on the field."

Few teams in the area have a richer tradition of lining up behind an offense and playing smashmouth than Jackson, a Class 5 state semifinalist the last two years.

The Indians utilized its most explosive offensive player, Adam Zweigart, by having him carry the ball more than 300 times -- making him the only back in the area to carry more than Williams, though Zweigart played in 12 of Jackson's 13 games to Williams' 10 starts.

Zweigart sat out Farmington's 42-38 victory, in which Krause dominated the first half with three plays: a 79-yard touchdown catch and two 80-yard-plus kick returns, one for a TD and one that set up a TD. After the Knights built a 30-18 halftime lead, Krause was injured in the second half and played sparingly.

"He was effective against us," said Jackson first-year coach Van Hitt, who was long the defensive coordinator on the staff.

Hitt is not ready to abandon the power game.

"To be perfectly honest, we haven't had the athletes to run that spread offense," Hitt said. "I couldn't think back to a year when we could have run the spread offense. We've had a couple good quarterbacks and we've had a couple good receivers in those years, but we've never had four excellent receivers paired with an excellent quarterback, so we haven't had an opportunity to run that.

"I like our offense because it's a hard-nosed approach to offense and that's hard to defend also. It wears on you more than the spread. When you get physical with a team, especially in the second half, it starts to wear on them."