It’s roughly halfway through the TSSAA football regular season — give or take a game, depending on how ambitious a team’s August scheduling was — and what have we learned so far?
Not much yet.
Although the calendar officially flipped to fall earlier this week, for the most part we know less about our Chattanooga-area teams this deep into a season than any year in recent memory. Some of that could be attributed to the TSSAA’s new scheduling format, which loads much of the region games for every team on the back end of the schedule. The result is that nine area teams have not yet played a single region game.
So while many area teams are still finding their footing and exactly what their long-term expectations should be for the season, it also means we’re about to figure out a lot in the coming weeks with region races heating up as the temperatures finally begin to cool down.
A handful of local teams — those that are legitimate contenders to end the season at Finley Stadium playing in the BlueCross Bowl state championship games — likely still have two-thirds of their games lying ahead.