Shondell Harris shows he is more than a quarterback as Mary Montgomery stages big comeback to topple Baker, 34-31 in overtime, and win region title

 

 

 

 

 

 

By JIMMY WIGFIELD

MOBILE — Shondell Harris heard that he isn’t a quarterback, heard it until he boiled over and wondered what he had to do to prove it.

That chance came Friday night, when he led No. 4-ranked Mary G. Montgomery to a 34-31 overtime victory over No. 10 Baker after the Vikings had trailed 14-0 in the first quarter, even 28-14 in the fourth quarter, and had generally spent most of the game picking up their teeth.

With one foot in the grave and one arm and the other foot delivering staggering blows, Harris ran for 106 yards on 17 carries and two touchdowns, including the winning touchdown in overtime. With the game begging for a victor to emerge, Harris also delivered a series of throws that landed squarely on the Hornets’ chin and finished 11-of-21 passing for 156 yards and another score.

“I did run a lot but I just took what they gave me,” said Harris, a junior in his first season as Mary Montgomery’s starting quarterback. “They can call me what they want but I know what I am deep down.”

That he is an accomplished quarterback was settled indisputably after Harris pulled the Vikings out of a scalding pot of water and finally, inevitably — with MGM facing a win or lose fourth down in overtime — improvised on what might have been a disastrous play and tumbled into the end zone from 2 yards out.

And there, scattered and smothered under a pile of his jubilant teammates, Harris contemplated his next big move after digging out.

“I’m going to Waffle House with my teammates and then I’m going home and going to bed because I’ve got work in the morning,” Harris said.

He put away a celebratory waffle, sausage and eggs, then scurried into the night to get some sleep before clocking in at Dunkin’ Donuts Saturday.

It amounted to a double shift because Harris literally worked overtime to bring the victory and a second straight 7A Region 1 championship to a program that as recently as 2021 was so moribund that the school needn’t order any shoelaces for its football program, only toe tags.

 

‘You going to throw the ball?’

 

What Harris showed Friday night is that he is not only a quarterback — he is the living heart of his team and Baker did everything it could to rip him out of the Vikings’ chest, only to find he was impenetrable.

The showdown featured the top two defenses in Class 7A and both yielded triple the number of points they usually allow. The difference was Mary Montgomery had Harris, who made the defeat tough for Hornets coach Juan Johnson to accept.

“I’m really proud of the way my kids played,” Johnson said. “They did a tremendous job trying to execute the game plan. Unfortunately for us, we didn’t find a way to finish and that’s on me. It comes down to making plays. They made one more play than us tonight.”

And, despite a deluge of penalties, Harris guided his team to do it with no turnovers in 66 plays and score 34 points despite Baker keeping the ball five minutes more.

Perhaps that is why Harris heard increasingly less sniping from his rivals about his passing as the game stretched into its decisive moments.

“They were yapping during the game, saying he don’t want to pass or he just wants to run,” offensive tackle Kyle Thomas said. “He just used that as a little added motivation and he did his thing. They were saying stuff like, ‘Hey, you going to throw the ball?”’

He did and mostly against good man-to-man coverage.

“He was really excited about the opportunity to show that he’s more than just a runner,” MGM coach Zach Golson said. “I think that has been kind of the word out there that he’s just a running back and he was talking about that. He made some really big throws. Those guys are fast and physical and they’ve done a good job all year covering guys. I think we did a good job of formations.”

In the third quarter, Harris converted a third-and-4 with a 26-yard completion to Shermar Elston away from the blitz side. Trailing 28-14 early in the fourth quarter, Harris went underneath to Jaiden Smith, who hopped out of the grasp of defensive back Myles Johnson for a 25-yard completion that set up Harris’ 18-yard TD pass to Elston, the big 6-foot-2 receiver who bodied up on Jawon Springs at the goal line.

On a 90-yard, 10-play drive to tie the game, Harris hurled a perfect deep ball to T.J. Collier, who got open behind a defender but failed to reel in what would have been an 81-yard touchdown. Harris shook it off and used eight more plays — including two bombs that drew two crucial pass interference penalties on the Hornets — to drive the Vikings to Thomas White’s 8-yard TD run which made it 28-28 with 4:03 to go.

“They gave us some coverage that was zero-type coverage or just true one-on-one type coverage,” Golson said. “And we’ve got good playmakers, we’ve just got to give them a chance to go make those plays. We had some opportunities tonight to go win some of those matchups.”

 

Trusting in the winner

 

Harris has been winning such matchups for a while but those outside of Semmes haven’t noticed. Harris quarterbacked the Semmes Middle School team to an 8-1 finish as an eighth grader and the MGM freshmen to an 8-0 finish. Many also don’t realize that he actually has more yardage passing (1,314) than running (1,173) in his career, giving Golson immense confidence in Harris and options most coaches don’t have.

So, you take chances with someone who is more than a quarterback. You go for it on fourth-and-2 at your own 28 on your first possession, although Baker stopped Harris for a 4-yard loss and in exchange got a short field that led to the Hornets’ early 14-0 lead.

And with Harris’ magnificent performance in the fourth quarter — when he kept or threw on 15 of the last 22 plays and helped the Vikings to an incredible 11 first downs — Golson didn’t hesitate to go for the win on fourth-and-2 in overtime instead of a field goal to force a second overtime.

“We’ve shown that since day one when we got here, we’re gonna be aggressive in how we play the game and I think our kids play like that,” Golson said. “And I think that helps us when we get in late moments like this.”

Baker’s Blayne Munson had kicked a 20-yard field goal on the first possession in overtime to make it 31-28. Munson also missed a 39-yard field goal in the first quarter, a huge difference in a close game.

When MGM got the ball in overtime, it faced fourth-and-goal from the 2 and Golson called a Q lead to the wide side of the field, to Harris’ left. But the short side splayed open and Harris immediately pivoted to his right and plowed through to the end zone behind Thomas before being swarmed by his delirious teammates.

“He has such great instincts,” Golson said of Harris. “He found a hole and found his way in there. It was a great game. Baker has a really good team. They’re very good on defense. I never felt like we had them where we wanted them, I’ll tell you that. But I did trust in our guys, I believed in our guys. If we just kept staying the course and executing, we’d find a way.”

After 48 minutes and overtime, it was the only time Mary Montgomery led in the game as the Vikings (8-1, 6-0 7A Region 1) claimed their 16^th straight region victory and 26^th win in the last 29 games. They are also 10-0 under Golson when scoring 30-plus points.

Thomas said the final play was supposed to go the other way but he was blocking and didn’t see who ran into him from behind, although he had a good idea who it was.

“I was really surprised when he ended up coming up my butt,” Thomas said of Harris. “I really don’t know what happened but I know he just ran right into me and I pancaked the guy. Shondell’s a really great athlete, so he’s able to do things like that, kind of change the play into something.”

Harris had another reason to want the ball in overtime. In at safety, he missed a tackle on Jailen Wheeler’s 60-yard TD run early in the third quarter that made it 21-7.

“I ain’t sure if we ran around a block or overran it,” MGM defensive coordinator Alex Page said. “Shondell ended up missing the tackle, so I told him he had to get one back for us on offense — and he did.”

Harris was not the only one to atone for a mistake. Defensive back Aaron Hill, who had a coverage bust that allowed Wheeler to score on a 64-yard pass from Tate Graham late in the third quarter to make it 28-14, intercepted Graham at the Hornets’ 46 with 3:18 to play and Harris drove the Vikings to the 11 before Cooper Williams missed what would have been the winning 28-yard field goal with 35 seconds left in regulation.

“Aaron had a mental bust and gave up a touchdown but he came back and got the pick,” Page said. “To get that interception back, to give our offense a chance, it was big in a sense they didn’t drive and run the clock.”

Golson pulled on the reins at the end of regulation, deciding against his players’ insistence that they go for the touchdown and instead trying the field goal on fourth-and-4 at Baker’s 11.

“It was the right decision to kick it right there, giving Cooper a chance, based on where the ball was, the down and distance,” Golson said. “It was a chance to win the game. He didn’t make it that time but that’s how you get better sometimes, through failure.”

 

‘A lot of juice’

 

The same could be said of MGM’s offense, which was stoned in the first quarter, managing only 52 yards, but finished with 410, including 226 on the ground.

“They had a lot of juice,” Thomas said of the Hornets. “They were doing some things that we weren’t prepared for. I felt like we were a little too cocky, a little too amped up maybe. And they punched us in the mouth and we answered. They’re playing really fast. They were slanting gaps. Everything was kind of off a little bit. We just had to settle in.”

Observed offensive tackle Jon Stephens: “Their defense really was impressive early on. They were playing faster than us. And they brought the intensity, for sure.”

Harris said the Vikings started getting comfortable in the second quarter.

“They did a lot defensively but we adjusted to it and they couldn’t handle it,” Harris said. “Our word for the week was relentless and everybody just gave relentless effort. We just stayed dialed in to each other. We just kept believing in our O-line. We just kept believing in our run game. If we executed in our run game, we were unstoppable.”

Baker’s Wheeler gave the Vikings a lot of grief, running for 147 yards on 18 carries and scoring on runs of 8 and 31 yards in the first quarter, then erupting for the 60-yard TD run and the 64-yard scoring pass in the second half.

Page — whose defense held the Hornets to a combined 28 yards and no first downs in the second and fourth quarters — said MGM had to switch to the second of two game plans after Baker seized the big early lead.

“The first one that we rolled out there was a little more tailored to a passing game and they found some of the run weaknesses in that, so we had to get out of that and went more back to who we really are and just kind of worked the right guys in the right spots from there,” Page said. “We put a little more speed on the edge and really contained that edge because that buck sweep they were running was giving us a problem.”

Elston had six receptions for 102 yards, including a diving 6-yard TD pass from Harris in the second quarter, but Golson said his team must clean up its ongoing penalty problems if it hopes to contend for the state championship. The Vikings had 12 penalties for 109 yards.

“There’s a lot of things we gotta get fixed if we want make any kind of run in the playoffs,” he said. “We do have a good team, we’re talented, but we’ve gotta cut out penalties. I think the refs are already conscious that we’re a little chippy and we’ve just gotta cut that. That’s not who we want to be. It’s not how we built our program and our kids know better. If we’ll continue to execute and line up and operate, we can play with anybody in the state, minus the penalties.”

The Hornets (6-2, 5-1) will likely finish as the region runner-up and host a first-round playoff game as they try to break an 11-game losing streak in the postseason.

“We’re just trying to take it to the next step, to put Baker where it should be,” Johnson said.