The gist
- Gilmer 48, Sulphur Springs 38. First meeting between the two schools since 1979, first regular-season varsity trip to Gerald Prim Stadium, and the Buckeyes are 3-1 with one game left before district.
- Zade Taylor was the whole quarterback room. 6-for-7 through the air for 95 and a passing score, then 159 on the ground on 9 carries with two more touchdowns. He didn't miss.
- Kipton Neighbors gave the passing game a real second option — 3 catches, 62 yards, a touchdown.
- 171 points allowed in four games. 42.75 a night. A road win is a road win and we’ll take it. But this program’s plans run into December, and that number doesn’t travel there.
What happened
Gilmer 48, Sulphur Springs 38. Away at Gerald Prim Stadium on Friday, September 18. First meeting between these two schools since 1979 — the Gilmer Mirror's Joe Dodd notes laid out that Sulphur Springs led the series 9-6-2 coming in. Gilmer takes number eighteen and pulls the aggregate lead to 295-281.
The preview called this Friday One of Two, framing Sulphur Springs and Sunnyvale as the last two hurdles between the Buckeyes and District 8-4A Division II play. We cleared one. And a week after the Kilgore recap ran under the title "We Won the House. We Did Not Defend It," the second half of that title travelled up US-271 with us.
By the account of fans following it live on smoaky, the shape of the game was ugly and beautiful at the same time. It was 14-7 Gilmer after one, then 14-14. 28-24 Gilmer at the half. 41-24 through three. 48-38 final. And by that same account, Gilmer scored a touchdown on all seven offensive possessions. Sulphur Springs was stopped exactly once and held to a field goal one other time. The rest of the night, both offenses just kept trading punches until one of them ran out of clock.
The guys who did it
- QB/WR Zade Taylor (#2) — 6-for-7 passing for 95 yards and a touchdown, plus 159 rushing yards and two more scores on 9 carries. Averaging 17.7 yards a carry on a Friday night is video-game math, and he was the primary reason the offense didn't stall a single time.
- WR/OLB Kipton Neighbors (#5) — 3 catches, 62 yards, one touchdown. Numbers-wise, he was the receiver Taylor found tonight.
- The offensive line. They don't show up in the top-performers list we get, but seven drives and seven touchdowns doesn't happen without them controlling the line of scrimmage against a Sulphur Springs defense that had held Whitehouse to 32 the week before.
- Whoever forced the third-quarter red-zone stand. By the fan account, Gilmer recovered an onside kick, scored, then held Sulphur Springs inside their own ten and went 90 yards the other way for another touchdown. Those two back-to-back possessions — a takeaway and a red-zone stop — were the whole margin of the game.
What has to change before December
The offense is genuinely dazzling. Taylor is playing the best football of his career, and Gilmer entered this game with the fifth-highest scoring average in Class 4A Division II by Joe Dodd's tracking. That is a real thing to enjoy. Enjoy it.
Now the other side of the ledger. Four games in, the Buckeyes have allowed 52, 31, 50 and 38. That's 171 points, or 42.75 a night. Three of the four opponents have hung at least 38, and the one who didn't is Chapel Hill.
Do the projection. At 42.75 a game across a 10-game regular season, we finish having allowed something like 428 points. To win a district game against anyone with a pulse, you need to hold an offense under about 35. We have done that exactly once in four tries.
A road win over an East Texas 4A Division I program is a good result. It is also the third time this season the box score has told us the defense is where the season could go to die. Kilgore came in 0-2 and hung 50 on us at home. Pine Tree hung 52 to open. Sulphur Springs, with a defense that Joe Dodd noted returned only two starters from a 10-2 team, was in this game — and hung the same 38 they averaged coming in — because our defense could not close the door.
Around the barbecue
Gilmer fans on smoaky read this one clean, and the sharpest pregame voice in the thread all but drew up the game plan. Somebody wrote that the defense wasn't going to get any better this week and that the only way to win was to keep the ball, control the clock, and score every time you had it. That is what happened. Seven drives, seven scores. That is not a coaching adjustment; that is a fan base solving the equation the coaching staff will have to solve every Friday from here on.
The rest of the pregame board was split — some Sulphur Springs voices took theirs by 15 in a shootout, one wrote "first to 50 wins," a Gilmer regular predicted seventy for and sixty against and Buckeyes by ten. Nobody predicted a defensive game, and in the end nobody was wrong to skip that possibility.
Nobody expected a defensive game. Nobody got one. And nobody on the Gilmer sideline should pretend that's a compliment.
The other thing worth naming: this is game four, and the fan-side complaint about the defense is now three straight weeks of the same one. When the pregame thread, the in-game thread, and the numbers you can print off Joe Dodd's page all point at the same problem, that agreement is the criticism.
Our take
First, the celebration, because it's earned. Zade Taylor's night — 6-for-7, 95 and a passing touchdown, 159 on the ground and two more scores — is a signature East Texas performance in a program that has produced enough of them over the last twenty years that we ought to recognize one when it walks in the door. Kipton Neighbors gave the offense a second receiver it hadn't had. The line played its best game of the year. Give them the Friday.
Hot take number one: the ceiling of this team is not the offense. The ceiling is whatever the defensive staff can wring out of the personnel between now and district. Every game we scoreboard-win is a game we might have lost, and playoff football doesn't let you outscore two mistakes.
Hot take number two: the fan on smoaky who wrote "control the clock and score" is not wrong for the rest of the year. If we can't get stops, we can shorten games. There are worse plans than a run-heavy offense — Gilmer is already 76.9% rushing on the year per Joe Dodd — making the game about how many drives everybody gets. Pride is not going to fix a defense allowing 42.75.
And the falsifiable marker, because a stream owes the reader one. If Gilmer allows more than 30 to Sunnyvale next Friday, the offense will not save us and we open the year against district 3-2. Not "might." Will. Sunnyvale is the team that ended the Buckeyes' 17-season streak of advancing at least three rounds in the playoffs — the 27-17 area-round loss in November 2024. They walk into Jeff Traylor Stadium next week knowing exactly what kind of night this defense will offer them.
Next up: Sunnyvale
Friday, September 25, 7:30 p.m. kickoff, Sunnyvale at Jeff Traylor Stadium in Gilmer. This is the last non-district game of the year. It is also the same Sunnyvale program that ended Gilmer's 17-season streak of three-plus-round playoff advances two seasons ago. This one gets its own preview Wednesday; put it on the calendar.
Until then — 3-1 tastes better than 2-2, and if you'd rather back your reads on East Texas high school football than just shout them from the porch, that's literally the game.