WEST POINT — The West Point High School football team’s defensive game plan was simple Friday night: stop A.J. Brown.
The Starkville High School senior wide receiver entered the game with 30 catches for 339 yards and one touchdown, but West Point allowed him to make only four catches for 29 yards in the Yellow Jackets’ 16-0 victory.
“We just tilted the coverage to him and doubled him the whole game,” West Point coach Chris Chambless said. “That caused them to throw it away from him.”
West Point’s formula affected Starkville’s offense, as the Yellow Jackets had 178 yards of offense. Senior quarterback Montario Montgomery (10 of 19, 120 yards) was forced to spread the ball around to six receivers. Brown’s reduced impact on the offense resulted in Starkville scoring only two touchdowns — both off West Point turnovers.
“He didn’t affect the ballgame. Our defense played awesome,” West Point offensive coordinator Brett Morgan said.
Brown made his mark in the first two weeks of the season against Noxubee County and Oxford. He had 14 catches for 147 yards and a touchdown in a double-overtime loss to the Tigers and a career-high 16 catches for 192 yards in a victory against the Chargers.
“We wanted to make sure he didn’t beat us,” West Point senior linebacker Nick Melton said. “We did put emphasis on the other wide receivers, but we wanted to make sure he didn’t beat us.”
“This whole defense was about A.J. Practice all week was emphasizing A.J., screens and plays.”
West Point’s offense is built around the run, so the Green Wave didn’t have anyone like Brown their defense could practice against to feel comfortable in the game plan. Instead of finding someone to play Brown on scout team, Morgan, who played defense at Mississippi State from 2002-05, was the scout team quarterback.
“We put our coach in to help throw passes to our wide receivers so we could just get everything down, timing and all,” Melton said.
West Point (1-1) allowed only 153 passing yards and had two interceptions last week in its season-opening win at Louisville.
Brown, the No. 1 wide receiver in the state of Mississippi according to 247Sports, found more than two defensive players covering him at times. Cornerback Jeffery Davis and safety Tray Brownlee were responsible for Brown most of the night, but Melton shaded to Brown’s side often and he even covered him a couple of times. There were times when all three were around Brown.
“Three against one any day, three’s going to win,” Brown said. “I tried to do my best.”
The Green Wave defense even forced Brown to fumble twice. Brown tried to scoop a punt off the ground with several defenders around him, but Ledarius Glover knocked it out of his hands and Isaac Davidson recovered it. Brown’s second fumble came on one of his four receptions, as the defense swarmed him and the ball fell to the turf. Defensive lineman William Ivy fell on that fumble.
“It says we’ve got a lot of character and we’ve got a lot of heart,” Melton said. “We knew he was a good wide receiver, but we didn’t let that stop us. We wanted to show everybody else we can play, we can cover, and we can do what it takes to be a good defense.”
Every time his defensive players came off the field, Chambless met them with encouragement and they never hung their heads in the defeat. Chambless said his defense’s performance against Brown will only give it confidence as the season wears on.
“We played hard, great effort, and we’ve got great team character,” Chambless said. “We’ll see where this game takes us. I believe we got better from it even though it was a defeat. I think mentally and physically we got a little better.”
West Point will play host to Columbus at 7 p.m. Friday.
Follow Dispatch sports writer Ben Wait on Twitter @bcwait
Ben Wait reports on Mississippi State University sports for The Dispatch.
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