Kiehl Frazier, Shiloh Christian
File photo by Richey Miller
It’s being billed as the greatest comeback in Arkansas high school football history.
In Springdale, host Shiloh Christian was trailing unbeaten Nashville by a huge 35-0 margin on Friday night with 8:38 still to play in the second quarter. When the smoke finally cleared, however, Shiloh Christian had eked out a miraculous 51-49 victory in one of the state’s all-time classics.
The victory gave the Saints a 34-game home-field winning streak, while ending the Scrappers’ impressive 35-game road winning streak.
“It was one of those weird situations," Shiloh Christian head coach Josh Floyd said. "We had a great week of practice and were well prepared. Maybe we were too fired up, because we had made so many mental errors at that point.”
“Everything that could happen positively happened (for us) in the first 16 or 17 minutes," Nashville coach Billy Dawson said. "They helped us a bunch. We returned a fumble and interception for two touchdowns.
“I knew it wasn’t close to being over. We used a lot of emotion and we just ran out of gas. They’re just huge and we’re not very big. They’ve got some great playmakers. They never panicked and just kept playing. When that snowball started rolling, they were hard to stop.”
Meanwhile, Floyd was most concerned with Arkansas’ mercy rule which puts a running clock into motion if a team has at least a 35-point lead in the second half.
Floyd called the turning point “when we quit making so many mistakes. And our defense really didn’t play that badly.”
The triggerman was the Saints’ highly-recruited junior quarterback, Kiehl Frazier, who was somewhat bottled up in the first half, but constantly broke loose after the intermission.
The 6-foot-3, 215-pound Frazier wound up having a hand in all seven of the Saints’ touchdowns. He completed 17 of 33 passes for 273 yards and four touchdowns. He ran 26 times for 106 yards and two touchdowns. For good measure, he also scored on a 30-yard interception during his first action this year at safety.
Oh, yes, and there was his 57-yard punt which was downed on the Nashville one-yard line. A two-point safety quickly followed.
Junior tackle Troy Goss (6-3, 260) had three sacks for the Saints. Another junior tackle, Samuel Harvill (6-1, 263), who bench presses an amazing 540 pounds, had two solo tackles and one of his two sacks resulted in the safety.
The Saints are loaded with blue-chip juniors.
“It almost doesn’t seem real,” Floyd said of the amazing comeback. “It’s like a dream. That’s the wildest game I’ve ever been a part of. I’m proud of our kids for having no panic. They’re pretty tough kids and they don’t like to lose. They showed they’re mentally tough and have a lot of heart.”
The Saints (11-1) will be hard-pressed to produce a comparable encore when they play host to Bald Knob (13-0) on Friday in the Class 4A state semifinals.
