Region championship races tighten, Westfield finishes regular season in another week of Houston County football

The end of the GIAA regular season is here and the GHSA is soon to follow, but there’s still a couple of interesting matchups to be seen.

Here’s quick preview of this week’s games:

Find our Game of the Week, Veterans vs. Tift County, online on Wednesday or in the Oct. 28 edition of the Houston Home Journal.

Houston County & Northside

Houston County finished their home schedule last week in a 42-0 win against Veterans, but the Bears have one more stop in town before they hit the road.

Northside will play host to HoCo in the 29th all-time matchup, a series the Bears have dominated recently but the Eagles still lead 21-7.

Northside won the first 17 matchups starting with a 35-17 victory in 1998 for Conrad Nix against Doug Johnson.

HoCo’s first win was a 34-13 final in 2015 under Von Lassiter, the last matchup before the teams stopped sharing McConnell-Talbert Stadium with the construction of Freedom Field.

Since then the Bears are 7-4 against the Eagles, and in recent years they’ve taken complete control of the series.

Jeremy Edwards has never lost to Northside; his teams have beaten head coaches Chad Alligood (2022), Ben Bailey (2023, 2024) and now Daniel Williams (2025). In the last three years they’ve outscored Northside 153-36.

Kickoff is scheduled for 7:30 p.m. on Oct. 30 at McConnell-Talbert Stadium.

Perry

Perry will play their final game outside of Houston County this week after a 44-0 home win against Union Grove last week.

The Panthers will travel up to McDonough to play Eagle’s Landing for the first time in school history on Friday, and while it isn’t predicted to be a challenging matchup, it is one Perry needs to win to keep their region championship hopes alive.

With Warner Robins’ loss to Ola last week, the top four teams in Region 2-5A have one loss. Ola still has the best chance with tiebreaker wins over Warner Robins and Perry and only Union Grove left on the schedule.

The Golden Eagles are winless at 0-8 and 0-4 in the region, and many of their contests have not been close.

They lose by an average of 34 points per game and the offense has only scored 66 points all season. They’re on pace to be the fifth-worst offense in school history, though that’s been bolstered a bit by double digit scores the last couple of weeks.

Eagle’s Landing has been shut out four times this season and held to six once.

Kickoff is scheduled for 7:30 p.m. on Oct. 30 in McDonough.

Warner Robins

Warner Robins played their first game in three weeks last week, a 35-21 loss to Ola.

Now the Demons turn their attention to their final road contest of the season at Jones County.

The Greyhounds have had an up-and-down season; they started 0-3 and then won four straight, before Perry pounced on them for their only region loss to date on Oct. 9.

They are the only team in 2-5A with a head-to-head tiebreaker over Ola, so a win against Warner Robins would seal a region championship.

The Demons lead the all-time series 6-3 and have won four in a row. The series started in 1953 with a 13-12 win for Goot Stenier’s Greyhounds against Doc Kirksey, but it took a 59-year hiatus after that.

The two teams played annually from 2020 through 2023, and after a brief stint in different regions, they are back on the schedule.

Kickoff is scheduled for 7:30 p.m. on Oct. 30 in Gray.

Westfield

Westfield secured their third consecutive district championship last week with a 46-26 victory over Terrell Academy, and now they’ll finish their regular season against a struggling Deerfield-Windsor on Friday.

The Knights have been a pain in the Hornets’ side for the last couple of years, but this season they are 2-7 and have been on the wrong side of a lot of lopsided finals.

The Knights didn’t lose by one score until their 8th game of the season against Tiftarea Academy (14-7), and before then they’d been shut out three times and held to 13 or less three times (including a 6-0 victory).

The offense is on pace to put up roughly 108 points this season, which would be the eighth-worst total in school history.

Still, Deerfield-Windsor is 9-1 against Westfield in the last 10 matchups, including four straight going back to 2024. The Knights lead the all-time series 26-17.

Kickoff is scheduled for 7:30 p.m. on Oct. 30 in Albany.