[cksportsfan]

A few things:

1) Fort Knox had 33 (THIRTY-THREE) players TOTAL to start the season. That's freshman, JV and varsity combined. And that's taking some kids who had no varsity experience whatsoever, or football experience whatsoever in general (FK's middle school, Scott, does not offer football).

2) Of those 33, only THREE were even on the FK roster last year.

3) Fort Knox isn't the Fort Knox of old when Legendary coach Joe Jaggers was there or record-setting Derek Homer was there.

4) Fort Knox used to have a rule where you could live off post (i.e. Radcliff, Vine Grove, Elizabethtown) and attend the school if your parents worked there. Rule was changed after FK's glory years. That's why you'll see a lot of their good kids, assuming they still around, end up at Elizabethtown, John Hardin, North Hardin.

5) Fort Knox used to also have a rule that you could retire and live ON post. No longer. So, see above.

6) Fort Knox has far more transient than it was back then. Very few kids are there freshman-senior years. Lots of turnover. Again, this is different from the 80s-90s heyday run.

7) Fall break at Fort Knox is different than many other school districts. Because FK kids (and their parents, their families) are so far removed from their families, fall break is about the only time to see them between the start of school and Christmas (unless they can swing Thanksgiving, if you wanna pay jacked up gas and flight prices). FK's soccer and volleyball teams, which have much smaller rosters, do NOT play a ton of games during fall break, either.

8) That being said, playing in fall break in general for Fort Knox would have been a tough task. It would have been nice for Fort Knox to have scheduled its bye week during that week, but you can't always do that do to KHSAA's district scheduling requirements (meaning you can't pick and choose which weeks you play your district games. ... like you could at one point in the 90s).

It would have been nice for Fort Knox to give DeSales a bigger heads up so it could move homecoming. However, it STILL couldn't schedule anybody (can't take a district forfeit AND play someone because you are only allowed 10 games). Just would have changed the timing of when they found out and possibly avoided back-to-back "bye weeks" (assuming another district opponent had the same bye week and they were able to play the other team and then move the other team's bye week).