In a true battle of the Tigers Friday night in Brewton, class 3A T.R. Miller took down class 5A Tallassee 21-10. T.R. Miller moved to 2-0 with the win while Tallassee fell to 1-1.
Tallassee led T.R. Miller 3-0 after one quarter after Benjamin Graham kicked a 23-yard field goal with 8:00 left in the first quarter of play.
From there, T.R. Miller answered with a 9-yard score from Tamerick Jenkins to grab a 7-3 lead with 2:55 left in the half.
Leading by four at halftime, McHenry Coleman gave T.R. Miller a 14-3 lead when he rushed for an 8-yard score with 1:43 left in the third quarter.
Tallassee’s Brandon Baynes scored the Tigers lone touchdown of the night with 11:53 left in the game to cut T.R. Miller’s lead to 14-10.
Coleman would put the game away with 8:15 left in the game as he scored on a 4-yard run to give T.R. Miller the 11-point lead and eventually the win.
“”It was a very hard fought game tonight,” Tallassee head coach Mike Battles, Jr. said. “We made some mistakes. We knew coming down here that the thing with playing (T.R. Miller head coach) Jamie Riggs and T.R. Miller is that if you make a mistake, they will usually capitalize on it. We made of couple of them right there in the first half and they ended up getting seven points.”
Battles said his team moved the ball at times, but shot themselves in the foot. “You can’t do that when you come down here and play good football teams,” he said. “I thought our kids played hard and I thought we played the full 48 minutes. We are going to be a lot better of a team having played and come down here. You are not going to beat good football teams when you make the mistakes we did. Hats off to T.R. Miller. They beat us tonight and they were the better football team. We will learn from this and we still have a lot of football left. We start region play next and those are the ones that count. We will rebound from this.”
T.R. Miller Tiger head coach Jamie Riggs said he was glad to get the win Friday.
“Obviously they are good football team,” Riggs said. “We are really very happy to win the game. They whipped us most of the night. They whipped our offensive line most of the night, but we were able to make just enough plays to get the ball into the endzone there in the second half and get that distance and swing the momentum a little bit. I was really proud of my defense. I thought they really stood up tonight. We did a good job of just hanging tough.”

T.R. Miller finished with 14 first downs to Tallassee’s 13 and had 272 total yards in the game with 163 coming on 34 rushes and 109 coming in the air.
The Tigers of Tallassee finished with 303 total yards of offense. Tallassee had 238 on the ground on 51 carries and 65 in the air.
Baynes led Tallassee with 27 carries for 170 yards and one score.\
McHenry Coleman led T.R. Miller with 21 carries for 101 yards and two scores.
T.R. Miller will begin region play next week at Bayside Academy while Tallassee will travel to Talladega.
For a complete game recap, please see Wednesday’s paper.

Tallassee: 3 0 0 7-10
T.R. Miller: 0 7 7 7-21