The two remaining unbeaten teams in Class 3A high school football will meet Friday night in a state semifinal, and at least one of the teams expected to be there.
“I think everybody around us is surprised but we weren’t surprised,” Bismarck Coach Daniel Keithley said. “We knew this was going to be a good year for us. … We only lost one kid on offense, and we lost a couple of linebackers and we replaced them. This is exactly where we thought we should have been, coming into the season. Not a surprise.”
Fordyce (13-0) has the most playoff experience of the two teams with eight state championships (four in the playoff era) but has had to rely on youth to stay alive. Making a semifinal for the first time since a 2A runner-up finish in 2021 has been what Redbugs Coach Tim Rodgers called a pleasant surprise.
“To go through what we’ve been through starting out at the beginning of the year with a ninth-grade quarterback and a lot of our other skilled people being 10th-graders and 11th-graders, especially our o-line and d-line who had not been able to play much the last few years and losing the guys we did last year, it kind of surprised us a little bit,” Rodgers explained. “Especially after losing our freshman quarterback in the second round, that surprised us even more that our kids stepped up and just did things to help us win ballgames.”
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Bismarck (12-0) is playing in a state semifinal for the first time in history Friday night, hosting Fordyce. It’s a natural step up for the Lions, who played in their first quarterfinal last year.
Kickoff is set for 7 p.m. Friday at Bismarck High School, 11636 Arkansas 84. Bismarck, which earned a first-round bye as the Conference 3A-7 champion, has home-field advantage as the same-seeded team listed on top of the bracket. Fordyce is the Conference 3A-8 champion.
The winner will take on either Salem (10-3) or Mansfield (11-2) on Dec. 14 at War Memorial Stadium in Little Rock. A win will put the Redbugs in a championship game for the fourth time since 2019, when they won the first of two straight 2A titles.
While experience is on the Redbugs’ side, the key to beating the Lions is to not make mistakes and turn the ball over, Rodgers said.
“From the film that we’ve seen, that’s what Bismarck is good at,” Rodgers said. “They don’t make mistakes themselves. They wait until the other team makes mistakes and take advantage of it. We cannot put ourselves in position where we’re behind and we turn the ball over.”
Fordyce had not trailed in the postseason until last Friday’s nailbiter at home against Booneville, when the Redbugs overcame deficits of 6-0, 13-6, 20-12 and 26-20 to beat the Bearcats 34-26. Junior Zavier Jones, making his first start since freshman Andreal “Cadillac” Ellison Jr. suffered a season-ending knee injury against Jessieville, recovered a fumble on a jet-sweep and turned it into a 68-yard touchdown run to tie the game early in the fourth quarter and scored the game-winning touchdown on a 31-yard carry with 11.5 seconds left.
The Redbugs have been strong on defense all season, allowing 11.2 points per game and scoring on that side of the ball three times in the playoffs. They’ve also gotten stellar rushing performances from sophomore Micah Gamble, who’s rushed for 313 yards the past two games.
Fordyce has relied on its team speed to make big plays on both sides of the ball. Two-way players like senior running back/linebacker Brenton Sledge, senior wide receiver/safety Keilin Ellison, junior defensive end/tight end Vincent Stroud, sophomore wide receiver/free safety Jamartez Stroud, junior cornerback/running back Tramane Turner and wideout/cornerback Jamarcus Cranford have made their mark in the playoffs.
“There’s no doubt they’re probably going to have the better overall team speed,” Daniel Keithley said. “They’ve got some big boys in the middle of that defense, too, that’s going to be a problem. It’s a matter of, do you attack the middle where those big boys are at, or do you go outside and throw it outside where they have all those athletes and the speed at?”
Keithley’s two sons, senior Ben Keithley and junior Caedmon Keithley, are key playmakers for the Lions. Ben has thrown for 1,474 yards and 21 touchdowns, while also intercepting four passes as a safety. Caedmon has rushed for 1,107 yards and totaled 19 touchdowns (19 rushing and 7 receiving).
“They’re both pretty good little athletes, but the thing about them is they’re super-competitive,” Daniel Keithley said. “They’ve got some grit. They want to get after it. They want to win. Both of them take after their daddy and they just hate to lose. They’re going to do whatever they can to get it done, and it helps having a little extra speed as well.”
The younger Keithleys will be two of the best athletes the Redbugs have seen all year, Rodgers commented.
“You think about football players, and these two guys will be the first to come up,” Rodgers said. “They’re hard-nosed. They play hard. They get after it. There’s no quit. You can watch film on them and see it’s hard to bring them down. They break tackles. They do stuff to win ballgames for them, and it’s worked for them this year.”
Fordyce’s past five opponents, dating back to the Nov. 1 rivalry game against Rison, have been run-heavy teams, so Rodgers expects Bismarck to test the Redbugs on the perimeter and in the passing game.
“It just seems like we do something to win ballgames, and that’s what we’ve been telling our kids,” Rodgers said. “Just keep it close, stay in the ballgame towards the end, and usually somebody does something to help win the ballgame and help us score a touchdown, knock a pass down or make a tackle or something. … Just do the little things we do in practice and the big things will take care of themselves.”
This version CORRECTS the conference names for both Bismarck and Fordyce.