Breaux Bridge ended the 2024 football season on a positive note, winning two of its last three games after finally getting healthy at the end of the year.
The Tigers finished the season with a 14-12 win at Livonia to improve to 2-8 overall and 2-2 in District 5-4A. BBHS beat Beau Chene two weeks earlier.
The Tigers emphasized the run game all night against the Wildcats to end the year, rolling up 261 yards on 54 carries.
And nothing got the team feeling better than a final drive to run out the clock, using a dozen plays to salt away the win.
"It was a great way to finish the season," Breaux Bridge coach Tyler Pierce said. "To watch that final drive, everybody on the sidelines, that was a great way to end it. Literally, we're coming at you and can we make the blocks and just be physical enough (to have success).
"Do you want to put the ball in the air and try to win it that way? I think as a collective group (of coaches) over the headsets, we wanted to end it with a representation of the whole game."
The Tigers brought in big freshman Percy Moultrie and fullback Logan Roberts in a heavy package.
"It was literally just coming right at you," Pierce said. "We even let Isaiah (LeBlanc) do a quarterback sneak. It was kind of a rugby scrum. We would get about four or five yards off of it, to the point where we could kneel it down."
The scoreboard didn't show it because the Tigers shot themselves in the foot with penalties at times, Pierce said, but Breaux Bridge consistently won at the line of scrimmage.
"You get a holding call or a false start, and now all of a sudden, three yards a carry still puts you at fourth-and-six, or something like that," Pierce said.
Baylon Champagne led the Tigers with 18 carries for 108 yards and a touchdown. Isaiah LeBlanc ran for 71 yards on 17 carries with a touchdown, Jayden Chevalier netted 59 yards on 11 carries and Ja'kylon Thomas had eight runs for 22 yards.
The numbers weren't gaudy, but just what the Tigers wanted from their veer attack — three yards a carry to chew up the ground and the clock.
Chevalier finished with a team-high six tackles and Champagne added five. Roberts finished with four tackles and Noah Solomon had 3.5 tackles.
The Tigers had lost their opener 14-12 to Natchitoches Central, so the finish by the same score was satisfying.
"It's a huge momentum builder," Pierce said. "When you lose your starting quarterback, Jaden (Broussard), who really is just an awesome kid, it makes things a little bit different. But one thing that really happened the last three weeks of the season is we were healthy again. Instead of having 10 injured players on the sideline, we only had three."
That showed the players that if they had been able to remain healthy they likely could have had more success in the middle of the season.
Pierce praised his senior class. The coaching staff worked on fixing a lot of issues internally this season, and the seniors may not realize it but their buy-in to that will be reflected in the future.
"It's exciting," Pierce said. "We're losing a lot of good men and football players (to graduation), but now it's to the youth movement."
