O’FALLON – O’Fallon lost a tough game 43-36 to Edwardsville on Saturday night in the IHSA Class 8A Football Playoffs, but Panthers coach Byron Gettis was very proud of his team, which finishes the regular season 8-2.
“Oh, man, it’s hard,” Gettis said, “just because we had a good senior group. We’ve got some good, young guys, but that senior group did everything our staff and I asked of them and came up short. Those life lessons; it’s not a football thing with me when I’m at O’Fallon, it’s about teaching life lessons and we win some, we lose some. We win as a champion, we lose as a champion and I just feel it’s hurting me because I know that senior group was a good group.”
The game itself in the final minutes was a see-saw, back-and-forth affair that the Tigers’ defense came up big and got the stop when they needed to in gaining the win.
“Oh, yeah, that came down to a play or two,” Gettis said, “and they made the play to beat us. When you have situations like that, it comes down to the fundamentals and the least amount of mistakes win. They capitalized and they got a stop.”
The game was everything a playoff game should be, with two clubs battling it out to advance to the next round.
“When you have two teams that play each other in the regular season and get a chance to see each other’s homes, it’s always going to be that,” Gettis said. “It just so happened it was O’Fallon-Edwardsville, and every year we play those guys, it’s going to be that way. That’s just the way it is at our conference. We have a tough conference, we’ve got some good teams and it’s a battle every week. We had to play them first round, they got the best of us this time and on to the off-season.”
Dan Brannan also contributed to this story.
