The 2018 High School Football season is upon us and we are gearing up for another year of full Friday night coverage for you on KJAN. We will have a packed schedule of high school football coverage for you each Friday night throughout the season.

Every Friday at 4:45pm you can tune in to Trojan Preview, our weekly discussion with Atlantic Head Football Coach Mike McDermott. We’ll talk with coach about the upcoming match-up and once we are into the season take a look back briefly at last week’s contest. That program will also be available in podcast form on our programs page and then Trojan Preview/Who’s Gonna Win? page after it airs at 4:45pm.

We will then start our evening coverage at 6:00pm with another season of our high school football pick ’em show Who’s Gonna Win?. Doug Leonard, Matt Mullenix, Jim Field, and Chris Parks discuss and pick 8 high school football games each week. Each program will also be available in podcast form once it airs live also on the Trojan Preview/Who’s Gonna Win? page at kjan.com. We will also post running record tallies for our picks on those posts.

Then our High School Football Game of the Week coverage will begin each Friday with pregame at 6:30pm and the majority of kickoffs at 7:00pm throughout the season. Chris Parks and Mike Smith will have the call of our games again this season. You can listen to games on-air at AM 1220, FM 101.1, online at kjan.com, and on the KJAN mobile app. To listen online click the listen live icon in the top right corner of any kjan.com webpage. Find out details about the mobile app on our homepage at kjan.com. We are happy again to provide live video streaming of every game we cover as well. This season that video feed will be through our facebook page KJAN AM 1220 via Facebook Live. A link will be available on our traditional KJANTV page to find the game as well.  We hope this will make the game easy to access for all our listeners.

Here is a look at our schedule for the upcoming season. We hope you join us.

2018 KJAN High School Football Schedule
Friday, August 24th: Atlantic @ Saydel
Friday, August 31st: Audubon @ Fremont-Mills
Friday, September 7th: Griswold @ East Mills
Friday, September 14th: Atlantic @ Harlan
Friday, September 21st: Exira-EHK @ CAM
Friday, September 28th: AHSTW @ Earlham
Friday, October 5th: Atlantic @ Greene County
Friday, October 12th: Atlantic @ Shenandoah
Friday, October 19th: TBD
Friday, October 26th: First Round Playoffs
Friday, November 2nd: Second Round Playoffs

LOS ANGELES (AP) — For the second straight game, the St. Louis Cardinals rallied to win. And for the second time in the series, they did it on a ninth-inning homer off All-Star closer Kenley Jansen.

“It’s definitely redundant,” Los Angeles Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said. “Same thing we’ve seen.”

The Cardinals clearly love a rerun.

Paul DeJong hit the go-ahead, two-run homer Wednesday night for a 3-1 victory and the Cardinals’ first sweep at Dodger Stadium since 2006.

The Cardinals’ eighth straight road win helped them improve to 17-4 this month, the most wins in the majors. They’ve homered in 15 straight games, one off the current season mark of 16 in a row by Philadelphia.

“It’s been a snowball effect for us,” DeJong said. “We can win every game.”

St. Louis remained 2½ games behind the NL Central-leading Cubs.

“It shows the resilience of our team. Everyone steps up on a nightly basis,” DeJong said. “It’s always someone new coming through.”

For Jansen, it was the same old story.

The Dodgers closer, who became a father for the third time earlier in the day, gave up consecutive homers to Jedd Gyorko and Matt Carpenter in the series opener Monday. That was Jansen’s first game back after missing time because of an irregular heartbeat.

This time, Gyorko got a broken-bat single off Jansen (0-5), and DeJong followed with his 14th homer to left-center, giving the Cardinals their first lead of the game.

“Very frustrating,” Jansen said. “Got to figure out how to get back out of this mess.”

The Dodgers went quietly in the ninth, with Jordan Hicks striking out Cody Bellinger, Brian Dozier and Chris Taylor to earn his fifth save.

“Hicks was filthy,” Cardinals interim manager Mike Shildt said. “That was elite stuff right there.”

Dakota Hudson (4-0) got the win with one inning of relief.

Los Angeles loaded the bases in the eighth, but Manny Machado grounded out to end the inning. The Dodgers stranded 30 runners while getting swept for the third time this season.

They dropped to 32-33 at home, falling below .500 at Dodger Stadium for the first time since June 30.

Rookie Tyler O’Neill launched his first career pinch-hit homer in the top of the eighth off Scott Alexander, tying it 1-all.

Jack Flaherty and Walker Buehler dueled in a stellar matchup of rookie pitchers, although neither figured in the decision.

Flaherty held the Dodgers hitless through 5 1/3 innings. Joc Pederson broke through after Buehler struck out leading off the sixth, slugging his 19th homer to right field for a 1-0 lead.

Flaherty gave up just that one hit in six innings. The 22-year-old right-hander from nearby Burbank struck out 10 and walked two on 101 pitches.

“It was special,” Flaherty said. “I wanted to make sure to take in the moment and enjoy it.”

Buehler scattered three hits over seven innings, struck out a career-high nine and walked two on 104 pitches.

The Dodgers have lost three in a row and they dropped four games behind NL West-leading Arizona in pursuit of a sixth straight division title.

UP NEXT

Cardinals: After getting Thursday off in Denver, RHP Miles Mikolas (13-3, 2.80 ERA) starts the series opener against the Rockies. His victories are the most by a first-year St. Louis pitcher since Kyle Lohse in 2008.

The NCAA is ditching the RPI for its own evaluation tool to select teams for the NCAA Tournament.

The NCAA Evaluation Tool will rely on game results, strength of schedule, game location, scoring margin, net offensive and defensive efficiency and quality of wins and losses. NET will be used for the 2018-19 season by the committee that selects schools and seeds the tournament.

NET rankings will be released in late November or early December and updated through Selection Sunday, with a final ranking following the tournament.

“What has been developed is a contemporary method of looking at teams analytically, using results-based and predictive metrics that will assist the Men’s Basketball Committee as it reviews games throughout the season,” NCAA senior vice president of basketball Dan Gavitt said in a statement on Wednesday. “While no perfect rankings exist, using the results of past tournaments will help ensure that the rankings are built on an objective source of truth.”

The NCAA has used the RPI since 1981 to help the NCAA Tournament selection committee pick at-large teams, seeding and bracketing teams each March.

The RPI has been criticized in recent years for not being analytical enough. The RPI is calculated on winning percentage, strength of schedule and opponent’s strength of schedule, but more accurate tools for evaluating performance have developed.

NET will give equal importance to early and late-season games, and caps wins at 10 points to prevent teams from running up the score.

NET was approved in July following months of consultation with the NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Committee, the National Association Basketball Coaches, top basketball analytics experts and Google Cloud Professional Services.

Last season, the NCAA introduced a quadrant system to put greater emphasis on wins away from home. The quadrant system will remain in place for evaluating teams.

The NCAA said the RPI will still be used in other Division I sports, including women’s basketball.