Westwood's "Mules" will have to run through Northwestern

Watch out District Three Stadium, The Mules are coming.

Westwood is bringing its monster offensive line to Rock Hill Friday night to face Northwestern in the second round of the 4A Division II football playoffs. The four-year old school’s offensive game plan isn’t super sophisticated or predicated on trickery, rather a gut belief that it can run the ball against most anybody.

The Mules - so-named by their offensive line coach - average close to 300 pounds according to a story in The State newspaper earlier this fall. They’ve paved the way for running back Rudy Mitchell to rush for nearly 1900 yards this season, and two of the Mules - guard Torrey Boone and center Chris McCarthy - were picked for the Shrine Bowl, the first time since 2012 that two o-linemen from the same school both made the Sandlappers squad.

“Our work is cut out for us, and it’s gonna start up front,” said Northwestern coach Kyle Richardson.

Westwood completed just one pass during its 34-13 win over Conway last Friday. Red Hawks coach Rodney Summers said that was in part because of the success his team had running the ball - why fix something that isn’t broken? - but it is revealing of the team’s No. 1 strategy.

“We have to make sure we don’t get away from it if it’s not successful,” Summers said earlier this week. “We have to just keep hammering it.”

Trojans defensive coordinator James Martin said Northwestern has faced linemen as big as Westwood’s this season, but not a collective group as big. Their size seems to increase when they pull - when a lineman runs along the line of scrimmage after the snap, instead of just moving forward or back. Pulling puts Westwood’s Mules face-to-face with smaller players on the edges of the line of scrimmage, creating overloads and mismatches Summers’ team can exploit.

“You’ve got to worry about where all the pullers are going because you’ve got to be able to account for them. If they get enough bodies on your d-linemen and your linebackers then they’ve got great running lanes,” Martin explained. “And that’s why they’ve got a 2,000-yard rusher.”

Richardson said data automatically produced by the Hudl digital film service indicated that Westwood pulled at least one offensive linemen on almost 200 of 240 total running plays they saw from several different games, and that they pulled two or three linemen on multiple plays. That will put the onus not just on the defensive line and the linbackers but also the safeties behind them - leading tackler Ali Shockley and Shrine Bowl selection Miles Corpening - to make plays closer to the line of scrimmage.

“Our safeties are in pass coverage, but when it’s a run they’re gonna have to come downhill and make some plays,” Richardson said. “They’re gonna have to do it avoiding 300 pounds coming at them and if it’s two of them, then it’s 600 pounds. It’s a difficult task.”

Westwood guard Torrey Boone pulling:

Northwestern’s defensive line has performed to expectation this year. Defensive ends Trae’von Hinton - a Shrine Bowl selection - and Logan Rudolph - a junior with offers from Michigan, Southern Cal, Ole Miss and Florida among many others - sandwich a sizable pair of senior tackles, Winston Daniels and Jamah Mitchell, and there are solid contributors off the bench too. Aside from personnel, Martin said one of the primary factors in his team’s success defending the run is pre-snap movement of players.

“We’re causing a lot of problems at the last minute for offenses,” Martin said. “At some point they’re gonna run their play and they’ve got to hope we’re in a certain look. And we’re not gonna be in that look.”

Northwestern has seen what happened in the few instances this season when the Westwood run game was slowed. Dutch Fork and Spring Valley handed the Red Hawks a pair of losses to close the regular season by doing just that, and Summers said he’s concerned about his offense getting behind the chains and being forced into throwing downs.

“Try to make the offense beat us with their left hand,” said Richardson, using an analogy. “If we can make them throw it more than they run it then that feeds into our success, but I don’t think that will be the case Friday night.”

This story was originally published November 25, 2015 at 2:39 PM with the headline "Westwood's "Mules" will have to run through Northwestern."