The football team (1-2) will be facing a great challenge tonight when they take on Arlington (1-1) at Max Goldsmith Stadium tonight at 7:30 p.m. Head coach Gregg Miller said the Colts gave them a lot of problems last year when Arlington beat the Farmers last season, 41-13, before finishing the year 11-3 as a playoff team.

“Arlington, they’ve got a great offense,” Miller said. “They’ve got a great quarterback. They’ve got a couple of really good receivers. Their offensive line is big, strong and fast. Defensively, they’re extremely fast and extremely physical. They are very well coached in a very established football program right now.”

Senior defensive end and team captain Devin Tillis said he views Arlington like any other team.

“They’re a really good football team, but a football team is a football team,” Tillis said. “There is no ‘God’ football team, there’s only a football team that’s doing their job and playing as a team. We’re going to do our best, they’re going to do their best, and it’s going to be determined at the end.”

Miller said Arlington’s coach is doing a good job making them fundamentally sound, which is the same direction the Farmers are heading.

“It allows them to play hard because they already know what they’re doing,” Miller said. “We’re so much better this year at doing that. A lot of our kids have figured it out and they’re really determined to play a little bit more than what we’ve done in the past. We’ll get there.”

Miller said that he is confident in playing and beating Arlington, as long as the team does one thing: execute.

“If we ever execute a game with offense, defense and special teams, then we’re as good as anybody,” Miller said. “We just have to keep working on execution and stressing it to our team.”

Miller said that offense needs to work on moving the ball and producing points.

“We’re going to have to take the ball down the field and get it in the end zone,” Miller said. “We struggle getting all the way down, and we put up yards, and we move the football, and our offense does a great job keeping our defense off the field and letting us make adjustments and getting rest and letting us get water, but then we don’t get points out of it.”

In addition, Miller said running backs must improve in breaking tackles.

“We haven’t broken a tackle all year,” Miller said. “We run as far as the play blocking will allow us to run and then we’re done. We haven’t had any big breakouts, or runaways, but it’s coming.”

Playing a stronger first half must also become a habit for the Farmers, Miller said.

Last Thursday the team claimed its first win of the season, 22-20 against Irving, but not without letting 14 points go through from Irving in the second half.

The team’s defense has usually been very solid in the second half.

“That’s been our strong half, and we’re never as good as anyone else until we get them tired,” Miller said. “That’s kind of been our saying around here, that we need to find the wall. In that last drive, right before we threw the Hail Mary pass, we had asked the kids if they had found the wall yet and they said they had. We asked them if they could get through the wall and they said yes. And so they did, and that won the football game for us.”

Tillis blamed Irving’s comeback on the Farmers becoming too relaxed.

“People started losing focus, and that’s whenever the touchdowns came in and everybody woke up,” Tillis said. “I’m kind of glad [Irving] did that because it caused us to wake up and go to our full potential of what we really needed to do in order for us to win that game.”

Tillis said the team needs to work on being overly cautious.

“I feel like when we go out there in the first half we’re like ‘Let’s go,’ but we’re not all the way there,” Tillis said. “We’re ready for the game but we’re not ready-ready. We’re ready to go out there and play but I feel like when we go out there, we play too safe.”

Tillis also hopes to see a change in attitude during the game, and not just from his teammates.

“When things aren’t going our way and we’re heading down a bad turn, people shut down just because they feel like there’s no hope,” Tillis said. “Not just the football team but the crowd. We’ve got the Rowdy Crowd being louder than our audience, but it would be nice if we could have it all go together and help us pull through. People shut down when things are bad, and the captains help out and try to help [the team] out, but sometimes [the captains] need a little bit of help too.”

Tillis said the team has changed a lot since he was sophomore on varsity and credited the improvement to Miller.

“Last year, it was Coach Miller’s first year and no one was understanding why we weren’t winning games, but it takes time to develop all the new plays and it’s awesome,” Tillis said. “I’ve played football since I was in 7th grade and I did not understand anything about football until my junior year, because he actually sat down and broke it down with us while others just threw stuff at you. They never sat down and actually explained why.”

Miller said the improvement has shown up in the statistics.

“With Plano we were at 38 yards,” Miller said. “Against Ennis, we had 227, and this week we had 321. So we’re getting there. Sometimes it takes a while. Our kids work hard and it may be challenging for them because they put in so much. Last year there was a reason for the ‘I don’t understand, I don’t understand.’ This year, we’ve got a little bit of that still, but we’ve got more fight in us.”