Eagles travel to Opelousas Catholic

Central Catholic will travel to face Opelousas Catholic Friday night in week 2 action.
The Eagles enter the contest after defeating St. John of Plaquemine, 54-27, to open the regular season.
While the score was lopsided, Central Catholic needed two fourth-quarter touchdowns to comfortably put the game away.
The Eagles’ Stefano Guarisco had a dominant game as he rushed for 402 yards on 28 carries and scored five touchdowns.
Meanwhile, quarterback Blake Byrne completed 4 of 7 passes for 76 yards and a score.
Jalen Johnson led Central Catholic’s receivers with two catches for 67 yards and a touchdown.
While the production certainly is good, Central Catholic coach Tommy Minton said after the game that his team needed to expand its offensive production because teams would begin to stack the box on defense to limit Guarisco and the Eagles’ run game.
This week, they got to work doing that.
“We want to take what we’re doing good and build on that and be able to do some things off of it and we’ve done that, worked on that this week,” he said.
The Eagles will have to cut down on penalties too, as the squad had more than 100 yards in penalties a week ago.
“We had some dumb penalties, and that’s what aggravates you. … We gotta be a smarter football team than what we played like (Thursday) night,” Minton said.
Defensively, Central Catholic got off to a rough start as St. John gashed the Eagles’ defense 217 yards on the ground in the first half — including 160 in the first quarter — Central Catholic clamped down on defense as they surrendered just 44 yards rushing the remainder of the game. St. John finished the game with 278 yards of total offense (260 rushing and 18 passing).
Meanwhile, Opelousas Catholic won its week 1 contest with a 28-7 victory against Port Barre.
Opelousas Catholic was led on offense by quarterback David Labbe, who rushed 12 times for 82 yards and a touchdown while completing 5 of 12 passes for 94 yards, according to The Opelousas Daily World. Aaron Miller led the rushing attack with 17 carries for 110 yards and a touchdown, while Evan Moody had 30 yards receiving to lead the team, according to the newspaper.
“The tailback is a good hardnosed runner, and the quarterback will take it and run it on some bootlegs and stuff,” Minton said.
Minton said Opelousas Catholic is a physical football team.
“They like to run the ball out the I-formation, and they do a couple other things, but they run power football,” he said. “(They) have a good size offensive line and they like to come right down-hill at ya.”
Defensively, the Vikings run a 4-2-5 defense that features quite a bit of zone as well as cover 3 and cover 4.
“They play a system that McNeese made famous,” Minton said.
He noted that the Vikings defensive coordinator is former McNeese State defensive coordinator and head coach Tommy Tate.
Friday’s game will be played at Donald Garner Stadium. Kickoff is set for 7 p.m.
By GEOFF STOUTE
gstoute@daily-review.com