CHARLESTON, Miss. — When Carl Diffee first saw KJ Jefferson go down with an injury last week, he was worried he’d be without his star quarterback with a chance to reach the semifinals.

However, the Sardis, Miss., North Panola head coach knew he’d do everything possible to play Friday at Charleston and even though he didn’t start, Jefferson did just enough to lift the Cougars to a 14-0 victory and send them to the Mississippi Class 3A North Half Championship for a second straight year.

“Our training staff did a phenomenal job getting him back and ready to play this game,” Diffee said. “He’s a gutsy player and I’m sure he’s sore as hell right now, but it’s a lot better to be sore and a winner than sore and a loser.”

A 5.7 three-star dual-threat quarterback who committed to Arkansas’ 2019 class in May, Jefferson completed 12 of 19 passes for 286 yards, two touchdowns and one interception in the win.

Playing with a left high ankle sprain, though, the Tigers sacked him four times for a loss of 39 yards. He had only two true carries and they resulted in a net of zero yards.

“It caused me a couple problems, but I knew I had to pull through for my team,” Jefferson said. “I had to go hard for each and every one of those guys, so I played through it and I just had to persevere.”

Charleston knew Jefferson was playing hurt and it was obvious early on that he wasn’t going to be able to run the ball much, which made North Panola’s RPOs almost completely ineffective.

That was a huge blow to the Cougars’ offense because Jefferson came into the game with 880 rushing yards and seven touchdowns on the season, including three 100-yard games.

“KJ was very limited tonight in what he could do,” Diffee said. “He’s more of a threat running the football in our offense when we can have both options for him. We had no misdirection game tonight and they were able to pin their ears back and come get us.”

The Tigers bottled up North Panola’s running backs at the line of scrimmage, but were doing so with seven players in the box. That meant they were also playing man coverage, so after halftime, Diffee said they decided to lean on Jefferson’s arm.

It worked perfectly. The Cougars started to move the ball and sustain drives with Jefferson connecting on 8 of 11 passes in the second half. He was just 4 of 8 in the first half.

The only points in the game came on long touchdown passes by Jefferson. He hit a wide open receiver for a 73-yard score in the first quarter and then fit a pass into a small window and let his receiver do the rest of the work on a 78-yarder.

“We knew they were going to give us man coverage, we knew the receivers had to get open, we knew there would be tight windows and KJ put it in there on a bunch of those,” Diffee said.