The Patriots’ Varsity Football Team has a very big homecoming game this Friday against the Chatsworth Chancellors. Birmingham currently has a record of 3-3 and Chatsworth has a record of 5-1. The Chancellors do have more wins, but they are 0-1 in league games and the Patriots are 1-0 in league games.

This Friday’s game has a lot of anticipation surrounding it–as it should, being that it is a homecoming game, which means many BCCHS students will be there to cheer the Patriots on. Last week, the Patriots achieved a tremendous 50-0 win over Cleveland and the Chancellors suffered their first loss last week by a large margin against Taft by a score of 49-14.  The Patriots demonstrated their strong offense after coming off of a bye week and the team also demonstrated their much-improved defense by allowing zero points. Whatever the Patriots did over the bye week, it paid off very well because the team’s offense had been averaging around 20 points per game and their defense was allowing around 40 points per game. The Patriots also started scoring right from the start of the game after they had previously started their scoring in the fourth quarter. These changes show that the team had greatly improved over the bye week.

The Chancellors had a very strong undefeated season until taking their first loss against Taft last Friday. Over the season, the Chancellors have had very strong starts. Chatsworth’s offense usually starts off the game very powerfully by scoring a lot of points and the defense dominates by allowing few or no points which ends up giving Chatsworth early leads in their games. This early lead gives the team momentum which means the Patriots need to shut down the Chancellors’ offense early into the game and score in the beginning to stop Chatsworth from gaining momentum. The Patriots shouldn’t have a problem doing this because after their bye week they started off last week’s game against Cleveland with a lot of momentum and that momentum carried on throughout the whole game.

The fact that Chatsworth was previously undefeated before playing Taft last week may seem intimidating, but it isn’t because Chatsworth was only undefeated in the preseason where they played teams that were not in their league. Birmingham however, struggled in the preseason (due to tough preseason opponents), but won their first league game against Cleveland. Birmingham will have a slight advantage over Chatsworth Friday because they’ve won a league game and there will be many BCCHS students there to support the team at their homecoming game.