It’s Columbus East’s best shot at getting its first football sectional win since 2020.
The Class 5A No. 12 Olympians will host Franklin in a sectional semifinal game that kicks off at 7 p.m. Friday.
Record-wise, this is East’s best season since 2020, when it finished 7-2 in the regular season and 8-3 overall.
This year, the Olympians started the season 0-2 and showed little promise. However, coach Eddie Vogel and the coaching staff turned the season around 180 degrees and won six of the last seven games to finish the regular season 6-3.
“A lot of it was belief in themselves,” Vogel said. “I think really against Bloomington South (in the opener), I thought we competed better than what we had done the previous year, and Columbus North is Columbus North. That was kind of an anomaly. I think with our guys, the moment was too big for them at that point, and so we wilted under that pressure of the crosstown rivalry game. I coached in a lot of those games. It really doesn’t matter what the records are for either school, one team usually handles the pressure better and we didn’t handle the pressure.”
East went undefeated in the Hoosier Hills Conference to win its first HHC title since 2020.
“It’s just a testament to our guys,” Vogel said. “We had a really good offseason, and I thought they really worked extremely hard in the summer and I think they just got tired of losing. We could have folded the tents after North, but they continued to believe in what we’re doing as a coaching staff and want to be able to hang our hat on and they continued to believe in each other, and they kept working. That is just a testament to them and their turnaround. The other thing that was different those first two weeks was we were starting three or four sophomores that were playing freshman football in less than 365 days. Some of the turnaround was also getting experience and figuring out what it is like to be a varsity player.”
On offense, Franklin (3-6) has gained more yards from the ground than in the air. The Grizzly Cubs have rushed for 1,938 yards compared to only 647 passing yards. Alex Leugers leads the rushing attack with 169.3 yards rushing per game.
Franklin averaged 19.3 points per game during the regular season and allowed 23.8 points defensively.
“Franklin plays in a great league. The Mid-State Conference is a really good conference, so that’s one of the things we told our guys is, ‘You can’t look at their record. You’ve got to look at how they play.’ They are physical up front on both sides of the football,” Vogel said. “They’ve probably got the best tailback we’ve seen. Leugers is a really good player. He is lightning in a bottle. The thing that is concerning as a coach is that we can do a really good job bottling him up, and then he can take one to the house. We preached about being gap-sound and pursuing the football and getting a lot of guys to him because he does a really good job of breaking tackles, as well. He’s a really strong runner, so our guys got a healthy respect for him, and what they can do offensively.”
As much as the running game has been effective, the passing game has had the best season in Vogel’s four-year tenure with the Olympians. East totaled 1,295 yards passing to go along with 1,637 yards rushing.
The Olympians averaged 32.3 points offensively and allowed just 18 points defensively. If the 0-2 start is taken out of the equation, they averaged 40. 7 points offensively and 13.2 defensively over the final seven games.
“We felt like our skill players on offense were the strength of our team, and we knew that our offensive line would have to come around. We thought we had some good guys coming back, but we knew we were going to have to fill some holes,” Vogel said. “(Quarterback) Kyson (Villarreal) has done a good job of dealing it around to different guys, and we made a lot more explosive plays, which makes a big difference. We made a lot of explosive plays this year in the passing game, so that definitely helps.”
East will be the slight favorite heading into Friday’s game, but Franklin is much better than what its record shows.
The Jeff Sagarin Rating has the Olympians as a six-point favorite, but the Grizzly Cubs played a tougher schedule against MSC competition, ranking 30th compared to 125th for the Olympians. East and Franklin do have one common opponent in New Albany. Both teams routed the Bulldogs, with the Olympians winning 43-17 and the Grizzly Cubs winning 47-6.
Should East prevail, it’ll likely setup a road trip to St. Leon to play two-time defending Class 4A state champion East Central. If the two teams do meet on Nov. 8, the Trojans would be a seven-point favorite.
Being two weeks since their last game, the Olympians have to start out swinging and not get rusty to start the game.
“If you look at going 6-1 at the end of the season, and you look at those games, we got off to a fast start in everyone of those,” Vogel said. “That doesn’t necessarily mean putting a bunch of points on the board, it means matching the other team’s physicality and guys believing that they can play with them… so those first six minutes of the game can tell a lot for a team on how the full game is going to go.”
