LEXINGTON — Senior quarterback Lennon Ries and the Russellville Panthers got the ball at their own 7-yard line, with 10 minutes and change left in their KHSAA Class 1A championship tilt with the bigger, stronger Pikeville Panthers.
Russellville had the ball, the momentum, and plenty of plays left in its repertoire.
Pikeville relied on ball control to build a first-half lead, but Mikie Benton’s Russellville squad was ready to strike.
“I really thought we were going to be able to punch it in,” Benton said after Pikeville held on for a hard-fought, 30-27 victory over Russellville on Friday afternoon at the University of Kentucky’s Kroger Field.
Benton’s bunch held the ball for more than eight minutes in the fourth quarter, and yet the Panthers could get no closer to the end zone than the Pikeville 30-yard line.
But it was the first half that was really gnawing at Benton, Russellville’s fourth-year head coach who spent his college career as a defensive back at the University of Kentucky.
Pikeville’s Blake Birchfield kept pounding the ball between the tackles over the course of the first 16 minutes, allowing his team to build a 2-to-1 advantage in time of possession going into the break. Only a sensational kickoff return from Russellville’s Chevis Elliott and a trick play for a touchdown pass on the final play of the half kept Benton’s Panthers from looking at a deficit of three scores at the break.
That part, Mikie Benton seemed to be taking kind of personally.
“We got in the locker room at halftime,” Benton said when it was over, “and I told the guys, ‘We haven’t played well, but we’re only down 10 points … I told the guys they needed to relax. We were a little tight in the first half, championship game jitters, maybe … Really, that’s on me.
“It literally took me an entire half to figure out what they were doing, offensively.”
Pikeville scored first, on Birchfield’s 3-yard touchdown run midway through the first quarter, and Russellville’s defense spent the rest of the half chasing Birchfield, Pikeville quarterback Isaac McNamee and receiver Wade Hensley, who had a 52-yard touchdown reception with 2:12 left in the half.
“You definitely saw a different team, in the second half,” Benton said. “To be able to hold a team like Pikeville scoreless, for a half, really tells you something … it was tough, it really was.”
Benton knows how hard it is to get here, and he counted on a senior class to ignite Russellville to its first championship game appearance in three decades. He counted on guys like Lennon Ries and Chevis Elliott and Jovari Gamble to make the plays on offense, when the Panthers needed them, and he knew a senior-laden defense could usually hold up its end of the bargain.
Just not this time.
Not when Pikeville was usually holding the upper hand with its field. Not when the Pikeville defense was keeping Ries bottled up when he tried to make plays on the perimeter.
Just not this time.
Benton will have to bid farewell to a talented group of about 15 seniors that changed the expectations at Russellville High School almost by themselves. The Panthers had an up-and-down, 5-4 finish in 2020, when COVID-19 short-circuited the season, and they went a combined 9-15 in Benton’s first two years on the Russellville campus.
But he senses this group was different, and he scheduled a tough non-district schedule to get the most out of the Panthers when championships were on the line.
A district, and a regional, title will have to do, at least this time.
“We just didn’t finish it,” Benton said in a matter-of-fact tone. “But we definitely set a standard. This playoff run meant a lot to our community, in Russellville, and I definitely don’t think it’s going to take us another 31 years to get back here.
“The foundation is here.”
Sounds like some marching orders for the Class of 2023, if you ask me.
Stay tuned.