Growing up in Lynchburg I know Amherst to be a community that eats, sleeps, and breathes high school football, much like Salem. I haven't seen them since '11 against Northside, and even then they didn't look like the Amherst of old. The last 2 years were abysmal by anyone's standards but especially by Amherst standards. The chaos I was describing, Amherst #1 had cited as reasons to be even more disappointed with Amherst the last 2 years in particular. I saw some of that against Northside even a few years back, as Amherst fumbled the ball like 8x (they didn't lose them all) but it crippled their offense. They lost yardage on a lot of plays because of the fumbles. Really the fumbles go all the way back to the championship game against Broad Run in '09. They had a team capable of beating Broad Run that year, but they really ended up beating themselves. Is that the coaches fault or the players? I'm not going to put that all on the coaching staff, but successful well-coached teams don't usually have lots of turnovers. Some of the fumbles were because players were out of position for pitches in their tricky offense. They were playing sometimes as if they didn't have a good grasp of their own offense. The speed and talent still seemed to be there just too many mistakes. Those are just my observations maybe I'm wrong, but it sounds like the problems haven't been solved and against good teams mistakes get you beat.
