Playoff-bound ‘Dawgs to face TVCC again
Navarro Football is in the Southwest Junior College Football Conference playoffs, athletic director Michael Landers announced Sunday.
Navarro emerged from the five-team tie as the third-place team. As a result coach Scott Parr’s Bulldogs (4-5) will travel Saturday to Athens for a 3 pm semifinal playoff game against the No. 2 seeded Trinity Valley Cardinals at Bruce Field.
New Mexico Military Institute’s Broncos (5-4) survived the tiebreaker and will advance to their first SWJCFC post-season game Saturday. Coach Joe Forchtner’s Broncos play top-seeded, fifth-ranked Kilgore (8-1) in a 3 pm semifinal at R.E. St. John Memorial Stadium in Kilgore.
Semifinal winners advance to the league championship game that will be played November 9 at the home of the highest-seeded team remaining.
For the Navarro-TVCC matchup, it’s not the first time these teams have closed a regular-season and paired up in the semifinal playoffs. As members of the SWJCFC, Navarro swept 10-7 and 34-31 overtime wins on consecutive weekends during the 1998 season. Similarly, it happened in 2011, when TVCC took a 55-51 win to finish the regular-season, but Navarro returned the next week to take a 42-16 semifinal playoff win.
NMMI left the old Western States Football League after the 2015 season and is playing in the SWJCFC for the fourth year.
Playoff pairings were announced Sunday as coaches gathered for their annual end-of-season conference meeting.
League administrators, athletic directors and coaches spent Saturday night discussing tiebreaker rules in Article IX of the conference’s constitution and by-laws. The implementation of the multiple tiebreaker became necessary after a zany regular-season finish left five teams — Navarro, NMMI, NEO, Tyler and Cisco — tied for third place in the SWJCFC.