By KEVIN ECKLEBERRY

Daily News

The Lafayette Christian School Cougars are hoping to close what has already been a successful regular season in style.

Lafayette Christian (5-2 overall, 2-0 in region play) will finish the regular season with a home game against Griffin Christian (5-3, 2-0) on Friday night.

Those same two teams could end up meeting in the Georgia Independent Christian Athletic Association 11-man state playoffs, possibly in the championship game.

The top-two finishers from each region will qualify for the state playoffs, and Lafayette Christian and Griffin Christian will each be the top seed from their respective regions.

Lafayette Christian beat Georgia Christian 52-22 on Oct. 4, and it was off last week.

Trailing 22-21 at the half, Lafayette Christian outscored Georgia Christian 31-0 in the second half.

“It was a tough game,” Lafayette Christian head coach Bill Bryant said. “I was looking for a bottle of Pepto-Bismol in the first half, trying to figure out what to do.”

The second half was a lot easier on Bryant’s stomach, with the Cougars dominating the action on both sides of the ball to win going away.

“I keep going back to it. It’s conditioning,” Bryant said. “It was a hot night, but they’d been working in the heat all week, and I think in the end it was the conditioning that paid the bill for us. Our guys were in a little bit better condition than those guys were.”

A strength of Lafayette Christian’s offense all season has been their running game, and that was on display against Georgia Christian.

Ben Dixon ran for 166 yards with three touchdowns, and one of those scoring runs covered 47 yards.

Cason Firth added 139 rushing yards with a pair of touchdown runs.

Lafayette Christian got it done through the air as well, with Nathan Fain throwing touchdown passes to Nathan Karvelas and Jacob Karvelas.

Fain also showed off his kicking prowess with a 40-yard field goal, and Bryant said the senior is good for distances well beyond that.

“He’d been kicking 50, 55-yard field goals all week, so we know his leg his strong,” Bryant said. “If we had that opportunity to do it, we’d do it.”

Lafayette Christian’s defense, meanwhile, settled into the game and shut Georgia Christian down after a rocky start.

“They had some great passes that if they would have caught them it would have been a different score, but they couldn’t connect on them,” Bryant said. “Our guys responded well.”