Passing grade

Passing grade

Walker keeps Marion offense afloat following injury

Sports Editor In the game of football, the adage of “If you have two quarterbacks, then you don’t have one quarterback,” gets thrown around an awful lot.

However, an exception to the rule is playing out at Marion High School during this 2016 football season.

The Pats (5-4 overall, 4-2 6A-East) enter play in a special Thursday night contest against Jonesboro (8-1, 5-1) by playing what head coach Jed Davis thought would be his backup quarterback prior to the year, but in junior Peyton Walker, he’s gotten much more than a limited passer.

Walker took over at quarterback when Jacob Green was injured on Marion’s second offensive drive of the season in a 42-17 loss at Wynne and has posted a line of 135-for-244 passing (.553 percent), nearly 230 yards a game through the air, and a touchdown-tointerception ratio of 24-9. His quarterback rating is a sharp 100.9.

“He’s done everything that we knew that he could do,” Davis says of his signalcaller. “You know, people forget now that he was also a starter on defense last year and this year, and he loves defense, he loves hitting people.” That role on defense, as well as Green’s potential as a dual-threat quarterback, was the primary reason behind Davis and his staff naming Green as the starting passer in the preseason. However, with Green’s injury, Walker has been a quarterback only for Marion since and that has not been a bad thing.

“He’s made some throws and some plays for us that, if he doesn’t do that, we may not win a few of these games,” Davis says.

Walker’s presence and command of the offense has helped his Patriots clinch a playoff berth, and a home playoff game next Friday night, and perhaps more impressively, has kept Marion in the conference title hunt until the season’s final week.

Marion can garner a tie of the league crown with a win over Jonesboro and a Pine Bluff loss to Jacksonville.

“We honestly haven’t given that much thought this week,” says Davis of his team’s potential title. “I’m excited because this is the first time since I’ve been here, and this is year 3, that I haven’t had to sell our guys on the idea that they can beat Jonesboro. The past two years, I’m not sure if our guys really believed deep down that they could actually beat those guys. At practice on Monday, our guys were telling us ‘Hey coach, we can beat these guys. I know we can play with them.’ And that was what I enjoy seeing. Now, that doesn’t mean it’s gonna be easy, but they seem excited about the challenge.”

And what a challenge. Jonesboro enters play with just one loss on its resume, a 40-38 loss to West Memphis on October 14, which was also its lowest point output of the season. Their next lowest was 41 points in wins over Conway (41-38) and Pine Bluff (4134).

“People always talk about their defense and how they give up points and all that, but there are a lot of teams, myself included, that would love to be 8-1 right now,” Davis admits with a laugh. “8-1 is still 8-1.”

Jonesboro’s explosive offense will be under the microscope on Thursday, and that front is headlined by Arkansas State University commit Jonathan Adams.

While Adams garners most of the headlines, Davis says that Jonesboro’s offensive depth may be its biggest strength.

“Adams obviously gets most of the attention, but when you break it down, (Jonesboro head) Coach (Randy) Coleman does a tremendous job of spreading it around,” says Davis. “The film that we have show us that Adams is targeted about 10 times a game. That’s not all that much, maybe 15% of the time. They’ve got an Hback, but he tends to get lost, and defenses forget about him from time-totime, but he makes plays. Their secondary receiver really frees things up for Adams. Adams doesn’t need any help, but their slot guy provides it, which is scary.”

Davis went on to explain that Jonesboro runs the ball more than they throw it, which one would not necessarily expect when thinking about a school with a Division 1 wide receiver on its roster.

Like Marion, Jonesboro is also on its backup quarterback. First-string passer A.J. Aycock was injured in Jonesboro’s win against Conway in Week 2, but Tyson Williams has stepped in and hasn’t missed a beat. “I think they felt about their guys like we felt about ours in that they had two guys that could start for a whole lot of teams,” Davis says. “I think they would have felt confident in whichever guy that they have out there.”

Kickoff at Cooksey-Johns Stadium in Jonesboro is scheduled for 7 p.m. on Thursday night. The game can also be heard on 92.5 FM.

Marion will return home for a playoff game on Friday, November 11. That game will also kick at 7 p.m.

By Chuck Livingston