The North Greene football team will make the long bus ride to Sunbright on Friday night looking to close out the 2026 campaign the right way.
“It’s a long trip and we have to get off the bus ready to go,” North Greene coach Eric Tilson said. “We have a chance to be successful on Friday, but we have to give effort, we have to execute, we have to tackle and we have to make plays.”
The trip from Baileyton to Sunbright, located in Morgan County, will take over 2:30, and that will give the Huskies time to get their minds right ahead of the Region 1-1A clash.
North Greene enters the game with a 2-6 record while Sunbright is 3-5. Last year North Greene won the matchup 54-14.
Sunbright leads the all-time series 7-4. Prior to last year the teams had not met since 2010. The first meeting came in 1979 and Sunbright won that contest 35-16.
Last week Sunbright fell to Cosby 42-6 while North Greene lost to Cloudland 46-36.
The Tigers will rely on their run game first and sophomore Tyler Jackson leads that effort. In its three wins over teams with a combined two wins Sunbright is averaging 48 points per game, but in its five losses the Tigers have been outscored 244-46.
“They are mixture of a pro-style team. They’ll line up in the I-Formation, hand the ball off and run a lot of play action. That’s something you don’t see a lot nowadays. They have a really good running back,” Tilson said.
Last week against Cloudland the Huskies leaned on running back Leon Johnson and he turned in 214 yards on 29 carries while crossing the goal line four times. In the process he crossed the 1,000 yard mark on the season. North Greene will hope to get that kind of production on the ground again on Friday at Sunbright.
“We knew we had to lean on Leon. He was averaging seven or eight yards a carry. He ran hard, he ran through tackles and he found himself in the endzone,” Tilson said.
Both teams have been eliminated from the playoffs, but pride is on the line as they try to finish their seasons strong. Kickoff is schedule for 7 PM.
