MOUNT CARMEL - Six weeks ago, when Mount Carmel beat Montoursville 27-8 in a regular season game at the Silver Bowl, few observers felt the teams would meet again.
Mount Carmel was halfway through a 9-1 regular season, while the Warriors dropped to 2-3 and did not seem likely to figure in any district playoff plans. That seemed more evident after Montoursville got buried 35-0 the following week by Lewisburg.
But, unlikely as it seems, the top-seeded Red Tornadoes will host No. 8 Montoursville tonight in the Class AA quarterfinals, and it's a pretty strong eighth-seeded team at that. The Warriors have won four straight games, including a two-touchdown win over an 8-2 Athens team in which they scored 49 points. They've given up just six touchdowns in their past four games, five of which were scored by Athens.
And they may have the single most danger-
ous offensive player, other than Bloomsburg quarterback Blake Rankin, in the entire field in 6-foot-6 wide receiver Cameron Karschner.
Karschner has caught 39 passes for 604 yards and four touchdowns in just eight games, and quarterback Jacob Jones has taken advantage of Karschner's size to take over games. The Warriors led Shamokin 6-0 going into the fourth quarter and could not run effectively to control the clock, but repeatedly went to Karschner on third-and-long plays to convert first downs. He caught 10 passes for 201 yards and two touchdowns against the Indians in an eventual 26-7 win.
"Not only are they playing good football but they're playing physical football," Mount Carmel head coach Carmen DeFrancesco said. "That's a good football team right now."
The Red Tornadoes had some issues during the first win over the Warriors.
"That was the first game we played with Meyrick Lamb and Jacob Kleman out because of suspensions," DeFrancesco said, referring to the two-game suspension each player served for a traffic stop incident involving alcohol and drugs. "We also lost Eric Joraskie with an injury in the first series that night. But we still kind of moved the ball well. We threw for more than 200 yards and I think we had close to 500 yards of offense."
Montoursville played that night without one of its best defensive players, linebacker Clay Stoner, who has 77 tackles and was specifically mentioned by DeFrancesco as one of the guys who really stand out on tape.
As for the threat the Jones-Karschner tandem poses, DeFrancesco said he thinks his team is in better shape to defend it than it was in the first game.
"We have some good news" he said. "This is the first time since week three that we have our whole football team on the field. We have not played with a full complement of kids since then. Elijah Duran (who last played in the North Schuylkill and had a concussion) is going to play. He's 6-3 and we're toying with moving him from safety to that corner against Karschner. We have to try something, because they're going to watch film on us and see what's happened to us against the pass, and if they don't put the ball up in the air against us, they're crazy."
DeFrancesco said that no matter what surprises the Warriors may have, he feels pretty confident against any opponent with his defensive front.
"We're so good defenesively that you always feel good going into a game," he said, adding that the Tornadoes still must find more consistency on offense.
"A couple of weeks in a row now we just haven't gotten in a rhythm on offense," he said. "When that happens, it's tough. I'm grabbing at straws playcalling, and that's not good."
He cited how Shamokin kind of tricked the Tornadoes into playing to the Indians' defensive strength.
"Shamokin baited us into running up the middle by leaving big gaps, but when the play went off, they did a lot of slanting into those gaps and were right there," he said. "We made a couple of adjustments at halftime and we really moved the ball in the second half. But what's troubling to us is that we're not scoring so much, and the name of the game is to score more points than the other guy."