Homecoming week can prove challenging for any number of reasons.  For the Georgiana Panthers, it would be easy to look at this week’s opponent—the 0-5 Red Level Tigers—and see an easy region win for Friday night.

But Georgiana head football coach Ezell Powell sees beyond the at-a-glance analysis of Friday night’s opposition.

The Panthers face two enemies this week—Red Level, and also complacency.

The former is a known quantity, but there is no game plan against the latter.

“They’re a young football team that’s trying to learn a new system, and it isn’t where they want it to be right now,” Powell said.  “They have a couple of kids that you have to be worried about, but for me it’s just about us playing our assignments.

“Yes, we understand where Red Level is in the development of their program, but we can’t be so relaxed to the point that we go out there and someone gets hurt or we fail to play our assignments right and, before we know it, we find ourselves in the midst of a tough ballgame.”

Upsets can happen across all divisions of play in the realm of football.  Powell was able to point to a very recent real-life example this past weekend.

“A lot of times when you play one of the better teams in your region, you come out fighting really hard to see how you stack up against them,” Powell said. “And if you can get a play or two made early in the ballgame, you start believing you can win. And most of the time, if you believe and play hard, you put yourself in a position to actually do just that.

“So we’ll make sure that we’re focused and in tune like we should be.  I tried to warn them earlier this week that when LSU overlooked Troy and didn’t win, we don’t want to put ourselves in a position where we overlook Red Level and don’t get the win.”

Georgiana is locked into playoff mode, with nothing remaining on the road ahead but region play.

But from the very first week of the 2017 season, the Panthers have remained even more locked on a bigger ambition than the playoffs.

“We talked about where we are, what we’re trying to get accomplished and who we have in front of us for each of these games going through,” Powell said. “Because the opportunity is to meet two goals here over the next four weeks.  One of those is a position to win the region championship again, and also to go undefeated in the regular season without an asterisk, because last year we were given a win from the New Brockton game.

“This time, we’ve taken care of business up to being 6-0, and so we’re going to try to finish it that way.”