After a lopsided loss to Twin Lakes in the season opener last Friday night, Logansport coach Brad Urban has gone back to the drawing board.
And the Berry coach has drawn up a new lineup on offense.
He’s moving senior quarterback Bo Bullard to fullback. He’s moving sophomore halfback Ryan Schrock to quarterback. He’s also planning to utilize halfback/safety Marcus Record more on offense and less on defense, though he is out this week with a knee injury.
“We’ve got to get the ball to Marcus more [when he returns]. We’ve got to get the ball to Bo more. You saw on that last touchdown run where he ran over a guy to get to the end zone,” Urban said.
The Logan coach talked about Schrock at quarterback.
“He definitely has the potential to allow us to get the ball to our playmakers. Bo, Marcus and Isaac [Eastburn] are playmakers. He’ll get the ball in the hands of our playmakers and stress the defense. Against Twin Lakes it was too easy for them to get the ball out of Bo’s hands. We want to make sure we get Bo the ball more and Marcus the ball more,” Urban said. “We put it in Saturday and the kids seemed to respond pretty well to that.”
Schrock is a 5-foot-5, 145-pound sophomore.
“Ryan’s a tough kid. He’s undersized,” Urban said. “We had him working in at quarterback earlier as a backup in emergency situations. Ryan is a team player and will do anything you tell him. He has a good mentality. At A-back his size worked against him. At quarterback he might be able to help our offense. We don’t have to have a big guy running our offense. He doesn’t throw a bad ball for his size. We’ll be able to do some different things.”
Urban said Austin Gaby and Jacob Shelton will fill in for Record at halfback. He said Record is out for possibly one to two weeks.
The Logan coach added Jacob Brown and Tyler Graves will see time at safety in replace of Record. He said last week’s starting fullback, Shelton, could be utilized on defense as well. He added Jacob Snow will move to offensive tackle and Jordan Cox to offensive guard in a move that was made in the second half of last Friday’s game.
Urban said the 33-9 loss against Twin Lakes was a “perfect storm” of things that went badly for his squad.
“It’s a combination of not playing well and the other team playing really well. We stopped them on their first drive, offensive drive. We pressed a little bit knowing our inadequacies going into the game. We tried to do too much and weren’t able to execute the way I thought we’d be able to. Twin Lakes played with a lot of emotion and we weren’t able to match it,” he said. “We simplified things in the third and fourth quarter and we did a lot better at moving the football. It’s one of those things for me as a coach, it’s the first time I’ve had them. I looked at the personnel and have made some changes based on our performance from Friday. It’s one we won’t repeat and hopefully people won’t expect a performance like that. One thing is physically we didn’t play, didn’t react like we should have.
“The kids are excited moving forward. They want to prove the team we saw last Friday was not the team we’ll see throughout the year.”
Peru opened with a 26-6 win at Wabash last week to snap a 13-game losing streak. It was Wabash’s ninth straight loss.
Urban said he scrimmaged against Peru last year when he was the coach at Twin Lakes, and he said the Tigers looked much improved this season.
“Their numbers are up. They are a bigger football team and more fundamentally sound. They’re definitely a program on the way up,” he said.
The Logan-Peru game is the state’s longest continuous rivalry game. This will be the 110th meeting. Logan leads 56-48-5 and has won nine straight.
