One look at Comfort’s 2024 football schedule and it’s obvious the Bobcats are going to be tested this year – both in non-district and once district play starts in October. Eight of the teams on the schedule went two rounds deep into the playoffs last year and one of the other teams beat Comfort during the regular season in 2023.
Comfort’s district is especially tough with all four of those teams advancing to the second round.
Bobcats coach Jay Rieken said he purposely scheduled a tough non-district so his team could be ready by the time league play rolls around.
“We’ll be battle tested in every game, our whole schedule is tough,” he said. “There’s no room for error and we can’t have a down week, that why I built the schedule up, to help get us ready (for district).”
A look at the district
Including in Comfort’s league is Rogers, Thrall, Lexington and Blanco, along with the Bobcats in a five-team district.
Comfort doesn’t begin league play until Oct. 18 against Rogers.
“It’s a solid district, not a week off for sure,” Rieken said. “Everybody’s bringing a lot of kids back, it’s going to be tough.”
Four of the five teams advance to the playoffs, while one will get left behind, meaning that one bad game can hurt a team’s chances.
Rieken said one of the keys for them is to stay healthy if they’re going to have a chance.
“We got in a bind last year, we had five starters out by Week 3,” he said. “(As a 3A) we lack depth in certain places and when you have injuries and start to lose kids, you start robbing the JV of players.”
A look at the team
Comfort likes to run the ball and one of their running backs closed in on 2,000 yards last year after Topper Sterling finished with 1,885 yards and 20 touchdowns.
If Sterling is going to churn out similar numbers this year, the line will have to open up some holes. They only have one senior; one sophomore and the rest are juniors and Rieken said they’re progressing.
“Our line is starting to come together and starting to gel and get better,” he said. “The cool thing is our offensive line is a group of guys that likes to hang out together.”
Comfort is only carrying about 25 players on varsity, which means there will be several two-way or iron man football players.
“We’ll have at least 6 to 8 player going both ways. Five would be awesome, we try to limit it as much as we can,” Rieken said. “That’s small school football at its finest.”
Players to watch according to Texas Football magazine besides Sterling are Giovanni Lopez, EJ Hernandez, Alexis Padilla, Carter Pape, Job Hernandez, Hunter Ledlow, Damian Neri, Jared Valadez, Gabe Gonzalez, Matthias Toca, Evan Valadez, Sammy Breceda, Jovani Zapata, Case Barrett, Cyrus Falcon and Jose Gaspar.
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