MOBILE — Keevaughn Johnson carried the ball 26 times for 175 yards and three touchdowns Thursday night, and Blount survived 18 penalties to blast Murphy 43-0 in a Class 5A, Region 1 game at Ladd-Peebles Stadium.
The result was the Leopards’ biggest margin of victory ever over Murphy and their fifth consecutive win in the series. It also pushed Blount to 2-1 overall and 1-0 in region play, already matching the program’s win total in each of the past three seasons with seven regular-season games still ahead.
For Murphy, it was the 24th straight loss, a school record, and the ninth shutout in the 12 games since Sherman Williams took over the program.
How Blount Scored
Johnson supplied the bulk of it. His three touchdown runs covered 18, 2 and 17 yards, and his 175 yards on 26 carries gave Blount a workhorse the Panthers never solved.
The Leopards’ passing game was efficient rather than busy. Quarterback Kaydyn Jones-Mills completed just 4 of 10 attempts for 65 yards, but one of those completions was a 53-yard touchdown to Tyler Bush — a single throw accounting for more than 80 percent of Blount’s passing production.
The rest of the scoring came from the parts of the game that do not show up in a skill-position box score. Blount picked up a safety when a punt snap sailed high, Ibrahim Faye connected on a 32-yard field goal, and Jaad Brooks added a 20-yard touchdown run.
A high snap on a punt is one of the quietest ways a game gets away from a struggling team. The punter is standing near his own goal line, the snap forces him to leave his spot, and the outcomes range from a two-point safety to a blocked kick returned for a touchdown. For an offense that is already having trouble sustaining drives, it converts a routine change of possession into points for the other side.
The Flags That Bothered the Winning Coach
First-year Blount coach Gus Smith spent the postgame talking less about the margin than about the 18 penalties his team committed for 175 yards — a figure that exactly matched Johnson’s rushing total.
Those flags either stalled promising Blount drives or handed Murphy’s struggling offense field position it had not earned.
“It’s killing us each week,” Smith said of the penalties. “We talk about it at practice every day and we try to clean it up but it’s one thing after the other. But we’ll get better.”
The concern is not misplaced, even in a 43-point win. Penalty totals of that size are usually a symptom rather than a problem in themselves — alignment errors, jumping the snap, holding when a block is lost, personal fouls after the whistle. Against an opponent that cannot punish mistakes, the cost is a longer night. Against a team that can, the same 175 yards is the difference between winning and losing.
Murphy had just as much trouble with officials’ flags, drawing 16 penalties for 115 yards. Between them, the two teams were assessed 34 penalties for 290 yards.
What Murphy Could Not Do
The Panthers’ running game was essentially absent, finishing with a net 28 yards on the ground.
Williams pointed to the same thing his counterpart did, but from the other side of the ledger.
“It’s hard to overcome first and 15 and first and 20,” the Murphy coach said. “We just got pushed around on the field and had too many penalties.”
That description is a precise account of how a shutout happens. A high school offense that starts a series in a hole faces down-and-distance that removes most of its playbook, and an offensive line already losing the line of scrimmage cannot manufacture the yards to climb back into a manageable third down.
A Streak That Keeps Growing
Murphy is 0-2 on the season and 0-1 in Region 1. The 24-game losing streak is a school record.
Williams, who took over the program last season, is 0-12. The numbers behind that record describe a scoring gap that has not narrowed: the Panthers have been outscored 70-7 through two games this year, after being outscored 495-12 across the whole of last season. Over the past two seasons plus these first two games, opponents have outscored Murphy 934-81.
The shutout total is the starker figure. Murphy has been held scoreless in nine of the 12 games Williams has coached.
Rebuilding a high school program in that position is a multi-year proposition that rarely shows up first in the win column. Roster numbers, participation in the offseason weight program, feeder-level youth and middle school football, and simply keeping a class of players together from ninth grade through twelfth are the underlying variables. Murphy is one of Mobile’s largest and oldest public high schools, which means the talent pool exists; converting it into a competitive varsity roster is the work.
The Park Crossing Parallel
Murphy’s season opened against a team in an almost identical situation, and the comparison is instructive.
Park Crossing and Murphy both began the year on 22-game losing streaks. Park Crossing played on Aug. 21, a week when Murphy was idle, and beat Woodlawn to end its skid. It then beat Murphy to start 2-0.
The Montgomery school’s run ended Thursday night with a loss to Benjamin Russell, ranked No. 4 in the Class 5A state poll — a reminder that the gap between snapping a streak and competing at the top of a classification remains wide.
Blount’s Turnaround Under a First-Year Coach
Smith took over the Leopards this season with the stated aim of producing the program’s first winning season since 2020, when Blount went 8-5.
The path there has been uneven but is trending upward. Blount opened the year with a loss to Vigor, ranked No. 2 in the Class 4A state poll — a difficult first assignment by any measure. The Leopards then survived B.C. Rain 44-43 in triple overtime, a result that says something about resilience even if it says less about defense. Thursday’s shutout was the opposite kind of win: comfortable, and built on a defense that did not allow a point.
Reaching two wins in three games matters in context. Blount has now equaled its season win total from each of the past three years before the calendar has reached mid-September, and it has done it while opening region play with a victory.
Class 5A, Region 1 standing is the practical prize. Under Alabama High School Athletic Association format, region finish determines playoff qualification and seeding, so a 1-0 region start is worth more to Blount’s season than the 43-point margin is.
Who’s Next
Blount travels to Gulf Shores next Friday.
Murphy is slated to play at Elberta, a team on a 12-game losing skid of its own after finishing 0-10 last season. Elberta hosts Spanish Fort on Friday night before that meeting.
The Elberta game represents Murphy’s clearest opportunity of the early schedule — two programs at the bottom of their respective ledgers, one of which will end the night with its streak broken.
Friday’s Area Slate
Games involving Mobile County and Baldwin County area teams on Friday, Sept. 4:
- Baker at Davidson
- Baldwin County at Theodore
- Bayshore Christian at Bayside Academy
- B.C. Rain at Williamson
- Daphne at Alma Bryant
- Foley at Fairhope
- Gulf Shores at Saraland
- LeFlore at Satsuma
- Luverne at Chickasaw
- Mobile Christian at Cottage Hill Christian
- Montgomery Catholic at Faith Academy
- Robertsdale at MGM
- Spanish Fort at Elberta
- St. Luke’s at Snook Christian
- St. Paul’s at McGill-Toolen
- UMS-Wright at St. Michael
- Vigor at Orange Beach
