The official start of high school football season is in 29 days as of July 21, with teams permitted to begin AHSAA competition on Aug. 20.
Mountain Brook will open the season in 30 days, as the Spartans head to Hueytown on Friday, Aug. 21.
As kickoff approaches over the next several weeks, Village Living and Under the Lights will count down the days until the opening kick.
Mountain Brook defensive coordinator Shane Stearns, entering his fifth year running the defense, said the staff has shifted away from total yards allowed as its primary evaluation tool in favor of a metric borrowed from the NFL: havoc points.
Havoc points track the plays that swing a game, tackles for loss, broken-up passes, forced fumbles, recovered fumbles and interceptions, rather than the cumulative yardage a defense allows over four quarters.
"The thing we realized, and I forget who it was that we played, but we went back and we looked at it, and every drive where we got some kind of havoc point, we got off the field," Stearns said. "Every drive when we didn't, we did not get off the field."
Stearns said that discovery reshaped how he talks to his players about success on defense, and he plans to keep leaning on the metric again this season.
"I think it tells a lot about how a defense plays, rather than just total yards," Stearns said.
He pointed to last season as an example of why raw yardage numbers can be misleading. Mountain Brook held three opponents under 100 yards of total offense, a number that looked dominant on its face but didn't tell the whole story against every opponent.
"The under-100-yards number is deceptive," Stearns said. "I don't really ever focus so much on yards per game. The way it is now, it's just hard to."
Stearns said he isn't looking for one specific player to lead the team in havoc points this season so much as he's looking for leadership up and down the roster.
"I want to see guys leading guys in the right direction, whether that be a younger guy getting an older guy to work harder by pushing him, or an older guy getting a younger guy to do little things right," Stearns said. "Everyone can be a leader. Whether you like it or not, somebody's following you, so you better be leading them in the right direction."
