Big Horn And Tongue River Football Teams Close Out 2023 Regular Season Vs. Burns And Wheatland

The Big Horn and Tongue River football teams close out their 2023 regular seasons on Friday night.

One game has playoff seeding implications while the other does not.

The Rams have already locked up the #1 seed in the 2A East, heading into their home finale against Burns, who is done with the season after this game.

Coach Kirk McLaughlin says even though there’s nothing on the line as far as the playoffs are concerned, this is a good time to fine tune a few things, stay focused on their opponent, and don’t try anything that may result in a serious injury.

“We want to go out and play a good football game against Burns whether it’s for something or not. We want to get better this week and we got to get better. We got to get an increase in performance and an increase in how we compete with our fundamentals and we got to be better this week, so yeah we want to be healthy, but we want to keep moving forward and our next step in front of us is Burns, so we got to stay dialed in on what’s in front of us and not get too carried away on what’s to come in a couple of weeks.”

Meanwhile, Tongue River visits Wheatland in a game where the winner will be the #3 seed out of the 2A East and the loser is the #4 seed.

Regardless of outcome, both the Eagles and Bulldogs will play on the road in the first round of the playoffs, but the game will help determine which team will go where.

Coach Steve Hanson says TR will be in a for a battle and he’s making a few changes on how some of the plays are called.

“Wheatland is a physical team, with a good tradition and a lot of really really talented athletes. What we can do is play playoff football early and we got to get into a mindset of establishing, maybe re-establishing even to a point, our identity. We going to have some change in who’s calling the plays. I’m going back to calling the offense in its entirety, as opposed to being a kind of a quality control guy and calling the run game, I’m going to call everything at this point and that’s my call as the head coach and say ‘this is how we’re going to play at the end of the year.'”

Games for both Big Horn and Tongue River are scheduled to kickoff at 6pm.