By Staff Writer: James Edwards
The Bulldogs’ football faithful showed up in bunches to Brighton’s homecoming game to show support as they welcomed our Howell Highlanders to town. This game had more than just the Little Brown Jug on the line: whoever won this game had playoff implications for Howell, and a win for Brighton meant it would bring them closer to a division title and a stronger bid for a playoff berth. This was expected to be the game of the year throughout the whole week.
The crowd atmosphere resembled that of a Friday night party as the raucous student section kept the pressure on the Highlanders from the get-go. The Highlander student body represented themselves very well too, bringing a solid student section.
“We love our student section, they always come out for every game and support us,” says senior quarterback, Darren Ford.
Brighton raced out to a quick 14-0 first quarter lead with the help of a couple long touchdown passes from Brighton’s star quarterback, Nick Brish, the first being a 50 yarder to J.D. Ham, and the second being a 34 yard strike, coming after Brish made an interception from Howell quarterback Darren Ford, to Robert Spencer to help the Bulldogs secure a lead for the game.
Going into halftime the Highlanders scored a touchdown to put the score at 14-7. The rest of the game was highlighted by the fact of the Bulldogs’ offense bullying around the Howell defense scoring two more touchdowns but missing an extra point to push the lead to 27-7 in favor of Brighton.
The reason why there was such domination on the offensive side of the ball for Brighton was the fact that their offensive line just simply gave Brish lots of time to pass in the pocket.
Howell was down 20 points going into the fourth quarter and were giving it their best to avoid a blowout, but Ford showed exceptional maturity and began to lead drive after drive downfield to get the game to as close as a touchdown for the Highlanders.
In other words, Howell kicker Kaci Cunningham became the first girl to ever score for the Howell football program.
“This game definitely hurt a little bit but we will come back stronger [this] week,” says Ford. “We’ve been here before and we can get out of it.”
