The James Wood football team ended one lengthy losing streak by beating Sherando in the spring, and the Colonels will try to put a stop to another tonight when they host Liberty at Kelican Stadium.

The Colonels (4-2, 1-1 Class 4 Northwestern District) have lost seven straight meetings with Liberty (0-5, 0-2), including the three games they’ve played as members of the Class 4 Northwestern District from 2017-19. James Wood is 1-13 all-time against Liberty and hasn’t beaten the Eagles since 2002.

At 0-5 overall and 0-2 in the district, Liberty isn’t the same program that went a perfect 10-0 in the 2019 regular season. But the Eagles are no pushovers — Liberty outgained Sherando 323-265 and limited the Warriors to 26 rushing yards in a 23-8 defeat last week.

“We don’t want to take anyone lightly despite their win-loss record,” said James Wood coach Ryan Morgan, who expects his team to be healthier than it was during last week’s 33-14 loss to Jefferson (W.Va.).

One factor that helped Liberty slow down Sherando’s running game was an alignment that the Eagles hadn’t displayed in their previous games.

“The’re pretty aggressive and they blitz quite a bit,” Morgan said. “When we’ve played them in the past, they’ve kind of confused our offensive linemen at times with some of the blitz packages that they put together.

“Last week against Sherando they ran kind of a 5-1 defense you don’t see a whole lot, so you don’t practice for it a whole lot. They do a good job defensively of scheming things and a lot of times show things you don’t see too often the rest of the year.”

Morgan said one of the big keys this week will be giving junior quarterback Jared Neal more help. The area leader in passing yardage (1,020) and touchdowns (13) had four interceptions last week and completed only 13 of 28 passes. Morgan said James Wood will need to do better with route running, which wasn’t as solid as usual last week, and protection up front, where the Colonels had to move people around due to injuries.

“Getting our blocking schemes right up front and keeping our spacing as receivers, I think that will help out,” Morgan said. “We had some plays last week where guys weren’t in quite the right spot. Jared was throwing the ball to the right spot and the receiver wasn’t there, or guys were in the right spot and Jared was under pressure and couldn’t necessarily get the ball there.”

On offense, Liberty alternates two quarterbacks. Against Sherando, Austin Mawyer completed 9 of 23 passes for 83 yards and ran seven times for 24 yards and Landon Triplett completed 6 of 11 passes for 72 yards and a TD and ran five times for 26 yards.

“I think [Mawyer] is a little more likely to run the ball, and they seem to like to throw a little bit more [when Triplett is in the game],” Morgan said. “But there’s not a huge difference with play calling or personnel packages.

“They’ve got some size on the offensive line. I think they’re one of better coached offensive lines in the district, year in and year out.”

James Wood’s defense is led by Ryan King (71 tackles, four interceptions), Zach Smith (59 tackles) and Caleb Keefer (54 tackles, 5.5 sacks).

“We have to try and put pressure on the quarterback,” Morgan said. “We’re focusing on getting lined up correctly, so hopefully we can get that worked out.

“I thought the defense played fairly well overall last week with all the short fields that they were given. But we still had some misaligned defenses that ended up not hurting us a ton, necessarily, but if other teams find those misalignments that can be an issue for us.”

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