[KHTS] – Most football coaches will say all they can hope for late in a season is to control their own destiny.

Well, for this season, College of the Canyons’ football team is faced with that reality.

Now, it’s just a matter of what they can do with it.

Following a tough overtime loss in week 1 to Golden West, a team that has only one loss this season, the No. 5-ranked Cougars have won seven straight games.

Most of them in convincing style that includes a dominant defense ranked No. 2 in Southern California, and an offense that scores 35 points a game.

Ted Iacenda

In his first season as head coach, Ted Iacenda has molded this group into a team that plays well on both sides of the ball and, despite their youth, the group has displayed confidence in themselves and each other.

The Cougars are eyeing a National Division- Northern Conference Championship for first since 2008, which would give them one of the three automatic playoff bids given to the conference champions in the National Division.

The fourth playoff spot is given to the next highest-ranked team other than the conference champs.

This week presents the squad’s biggest challenge in their pursuit of the title.

The sixth-ranked Cerritos College Falcons come to Cougar Stadium for a 6 p.m. kickoff Saturday, a game that can be heard live on KHTS AM 1220.

Like COC, the Falcons come in undefeated in conference play and are 6-2 overall.

Their two losses were to No. 1-ranked Fullerton College and No. 3-ranked Mount San Antonio College.

Cerritos is incredibly balanced on offense with 1,602 yards rushing and 1,608 yards passing.

Also similar to the Cougars, Cerritos is well-coached and opportunistic +12 in turnover margin, COC is +15.

With a win this week, the Cougars will assure themselves the Conference Championship even with a game remaining, because they would own the tiebreaker over Cerritos with a head-to-head victory.

This has the makings of a classic battle at Cougar Stadium, the kind of game Iacenda wanted to be a part of when he returned to coach the Cougars.

Don’t miss any of the action, your Hometown Station AM 1220 will carry the game live on the air and streamed at hometownstation.com starting with the pregame show at 5:45 p.m.

– Joe Soriano