All Monticello needed was a foot in the door, and the Billies weren’t going to stop for anyone, especially with Joseph Accelus on their side.
The standout junior turned in one of the biggest performances of his high school career, running for 397 yards and leading the Billies from a 28-6 hole to a 48-41 victory at Gravette last Friday. Now, for the second year in a row, the Billies (7-5), who had to win their regular-season finale at DeWitt to secure a playoff spot, are in the 4A state quarterfinals.
Monticello has won five of its last seven playoff games after missing the postseason in 2022. This year, the Billies started 1-4 and were 2-5 before going on their current five-game win streak. Now, as a No. 4 seed, they’re one of three remaining teams from Conference 4A-8 in the playoffs, along with champion Stuttgart and third-place Warren.
‘We’ve just got kids who keep fighting,” seventh-year Coach Randy Harvey said. “To be perfectly honest, that’s just the mentality of this group of kids. It was the same last year. They were always resilient and never gave up. They never dropped their heads when things went wrong. That’s the way they’ve done this year.”
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
When the Billies’ backs were against the wall far from home in Gravette, they responded again. Accelus had touchdown runs of 80, 75 and 11 yards, the latter with 1:51 left to all but put away the 4A-1 runner-up Lions, according to the Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
The slow start to the season didn’t affect much how the Billies prepared week-to-week, according to Harvey. Each of the teams they played during the 1-4 stretch — Fordyce, Bauxite, Dumas, Hamburg and Warren — made the playoffs, with Fordyce (in 3A), Bauxite and Warren (in 4A) still alive.
“It really was like going to practice every week when we were 5 and 0, to be honest” Harvey said. “We kept plugging and we knew we had a good football team. We just kept fighting.”
There is the real possibility of a rematch of the Oct. 3 meeting with Warren, a 27-23 Lumberjacks victory, in the semifinal round, if Monticello wins Friday at Dardanelle and Warren wins at home over Prairie Grove. Stuttgart is the last team to have beaten Monticello, 52-28 on Oct. 17.
The turnaround point in Monticello’s season was the following week at Helena-West Helena Central, a 26-6 Billies win.
“They’ve got some dudes on their football team,” Harvey said of Central, which lost its first-rounder at Mills University Studies on the game’s final play. We were able to beat them three scores, and I think that pushed our guys over the top. More than anything, just during the season, it was mistakes on our part that kept us down, and I think the kids understood that. It was penalties, turnovers and things like that, that got us in a hole. I think once our kids understood that and got all that fixed, they knew it could be a different story.”
Accelus has rushed for about 2,200 yards and 23 touchdowns this season, according to Harvey, and the coach said the Billies “hang their hats” on the 5-foot-11-inch, 195-pound running back.
“We’ve got a good offensive line up front, and they depend on him. The whole team depends on him,” Harvey said. “He’s one of our hardest workers on the team. That’s what brings a team together, when your better players are your hardest workers.”
Yet, the biggest improvement from the Billies, as Harvey sees it, has been on defense with senior Keilyn Green and junior Aaden Franklin on the line and senior Jon Luke Brotherton and junior Ed Ramos at linebacker all stepping up.
“That’s where we graduated a lot of guys from last year,” Harvey said. “Once our defense got turned around a little bit, that’s when a lot in store changed for us as well.”
Monticello won’t have to make quite the journey to Dardanelle (12-0), as it did to Gravette (317 miles). Dardanelle is just 164 miles from Monticello.
The Sand Lizards beat 4A-8 runner-up Hamburg 35-34 after senior quarterback Creed Vega rushed for both a touchdown and go-ahead 2-point conversion with 34 seconds left, according to the River Valley Democrat-Gazette. Hamburg (9-2), led by record-setting running back Ni’kel Lewis (53 rushing touchdowns), was unbeaten going into its Week 10 loss to Stuttgart for the 4A-8 championship.