Tigers' football season begins Friday evening at home

The Mountain Home Tigers open their football season this Friday night at home against the Columbia Wildcats.

Brian Floyd is in his eighth season as head coach of the Tigers, and is fairly pleased with the numbers he has out for football this season.

"Including our kickers who are doing both soccer and football, I think we're at 33-34 kids right now for varsity, which is better than last year -- up six or seven. The JV numbers are a little down -- they're around 22 or 23 -- but I saw some more kids come out there, so hopefully we can get them up to around 28," Floyd said.

"The freshmen are sitting solid at around 30, and we have a gigantic seventh- and eighth-grade team of over 60 kids."

Coach Floyd is looking at getting some good production out of the offense this year.

"We're kind of morphing our winged-T that we'd done a while ago with a little bit of spin offense, just a more miss-direction running game for us.

"It's not going to really change the passing game as much," the Mountain Home coach said. "We still have all our pass plays in there, and we expect to be a little bit more of a run team, but at the same time, I think that we have a lot of skill guys that we really need to get the ball to."

The Tigers open the season with conference foe Columbia, which opened its season last week with a 35-0 non-conference victory over Canyon Ridge of Twin Falls.

Coach Floyd expects a tough game from the Wildcats.

"They always have a lot of good athletes and they're usually big and physical. We've had extremely tight games with them. If you take out the very first year we played them, the rest of those games have always come down to pretty much the last play of the game, and one was an overtime game. It's always gone back and forth, so it's going to be tough no matter what."

Kick-off is at 7 p.m. Friday night at Tiger Field.