By Kyle Roberts
MONROE, La. — High school football season is back, and Ruston High will close out the 2026 Bayou Jamb on Saturday night, drawing Evangel Christian Academy in the last of eight jamboree games at Malone Stadium. Kickoff is set for 7 p.m.
The Bearcats get two 15-minute halves against one of the state’s most decorated programs a week before opening the regular season at home against Neville. For Ruston head coach Jerrod Baugh, now in his 10th season leading the program, the value of the night is diagnostic rather than competitive.
“I think this will be really kind of similar to what it’s been the past few years for the jamboree — playing a really good football team,” Baugh said. “It’ll give us a great indication of where we are going into week one.”
That indication, he expects, will come with a list attached.
“You would hope to go out and play well to give you a good feeling going into week one, but we know we still got a lot of things to continue to work on,” Baugh said. “They’ll let us know what those things are and where we are at this point on getting those things corrected. We just got to keep our head down and continue to work day to day and see where we land on Saturday.”
The team on the other sideline is built around Peyton “Pop” Houston, a senior quarterback who set a Louisiana Class 5A single-season passing record as a sophomore and is rated among the top quarterbacks nationally in his class. Baugh’s concern is not the highlight reel of Houston escaping the pocket — it is what happens after he escapes it.
“I think a lot of people may think that he’s a guy that just scatters out of there and runs. You see those highlights of him just running out of there,” Baugh said. “But he’s looking to throw the ball if he gets on the run in the pocket, and that’s the thing that makes it most dangerous. If he does decide to run, you can’t hardly get your hands on him to get him tackled, so you’re going to have to tackle really well whenever he does get out of the pocket.”
Houston will also throw on the move, sometimes with the ball nearly at the line of scrimmage, which puts defensive backs in a bind.
“It makes it really difficult for people to decide, are they going to come out of coverage and make a move on him, are they going to continue to stay in coverage,” Baugh said. “He can make some throws that you just don’t see a high school quarterback be able to make. Most of the time there’s guys that are scramblers that are really looking to run the football and you can kind of defend that a little bit better. Or if you know they’re always trying to throw the ball, that’s a little bit easier to defend. But if they do both really well, it’s tough to decide how you want to handle that.”
Ruston will not have a full scout and game plan for Evangel by design heading into the game as they would if it were during the regular season. Baugh said the Bearcats will run base offense and defense and treat the sideline as the point of the exercise.
“That’ll be a great opportunity for us to run some base offense and defense versus the things that they do, get some coaching on the sideline, make some corrections and run back out there,” Baugh said. “See if they can take that coaching and make some corrections without getting frustrated and make some positive things happen.”
That is also his measure of success, and it follows a week in which the coaching staff deliberately went quiet. Baugh said coaches normally spend practice signaling calls and then correcting alignment on the fly — scoot up, scoot over, you’re in the wrong spot. This week they stopped.
“It was pretty quiet after they made the calls, and we let the kids see what they know,” Baugh said. “Just trying to make them comfortable without coaches constantly having to correct them and get them in the right spaces. It’s kind of throwing the ball in their court and making them have to do things themselves and communicate on their own without coaches leading that. It was a test for the coaches too, to be quiet during practice.”
The Saturday date compresses Ruston’s runway into the Sept. 4 opener against Neville, the 101st meeting between the schools in the historic rivalry.
“I’m not real pumped up about the Saturday game necessarily, but it’s nice to be able to play in the Bayou Jamb one way or the other,” Baugh said. “It kind of puts us behind, I guess, in our preparation for Neville. But at the end of the day, we know Neville, and they know us. The kids play them in junior high and freshmen ball, so they’re familiar with them and what they do.”
Evangel opens its regular season against West Monroe.
