Carson football hosts Fallon

It may be a meaningless game as far as the Northern 4A playoffs are concerned, but don't tell that to the seniors of the Carson High football team.

Carson will host Fallon at 7:30 p.m. today in a non-league game and the Senators' final regular season home contest.

"Senior night," Carson coach Shane Quilling said. "Important night for the seniors, it's a chance to honor mom and dad."

The Senators (4-3) figure to have an easy time with Fallon (1-6), which is coming off a 52-7 loss to Galena. But don't tell that to Quilling.

"We're after them to play hard," Quilling said. "Fallon has only won one game, but, you know, it really doesn't matter who we're playing, the kids have been pretty focused the last three or four weeks and they've been playing hard. If we come out and play hard we should beat them, we're a better team, but we still have to play it."

Last season at Fallon, Carson fell behind 19-0 before rallying for a 29-19 win.

"I remember we went there last year and we were down 19-0; we had three turnovers, so you can't overlook anybody," Quilling said. "Is it a game we should win? Yeah. It would be nice to get all the seniors in to play, but we just got to come out, set the tone and see what happens and go from there. We're not going to overlook them. We're going to get after them."

All cylinders of Carson's game has been working during its three-game winning streak.

"The D has been playing well, but one thing that's been helping out, we're playing well on offense, too," Quilling said. "We're driving the ball well and giving them more time. They were out there for a lot of downs the first three or four ball games on defense because we weren't able to control the ball as well.

"And we've done a lot better job of tackling and we're getting a lot more people to the ball. Getting six, seven, eight guys running to the ball is a good thing on D and they've really been focused on doing that. The last three weeks we've been doing a lot better."

While the playoff scenario is still up in the air, Quilling said he obviously wants to finish the regular season with a five-game winning streak with wins over Fallon and Douglas.

"We can't control what other people do, we can just control ourselves," he said. "This game doesn't mean anything league-wise, but record-wise, hey, we want to win. There's no question about it. We have a shot to go 6-3 in the regular season, which would be a great improvement for us."

One of the keys to Carson's improved defense has been the move of Jack Brooks from outside linebacker to nose guard to give the Senators more quickness. He had five solo tackles in Carson's 56-7 win over North Valleys last week.

North Valleys attempted a 39-yard field goal to take a 3-0 lead in the first quarter, but the snap was bad and Brooks was the one who recovered the loose ball at Carson's 44. Brooks later stopped a third-and-10 for a 4-yard loss.

"I was pretty proud," Brooks said. "It was probably one of my better games of the season. They moved me to nose guard and I tend to play better on the line than I do at outside backer. I played about half of last season at nose guard."

Brooks mentioned how important the last regular season home game is.

"Senior night. Last home game. We'll be pumped up," he said. "That's what we're planning on. We want to get Fallon and obviously go game by game and hopefully, we'll have one more home game to start off the playoffs."