Tim Criswell realizes his team is going up against a high-scoring, athletic ballclub in its opening-round game of the state playoffs tonight.

The Carrollton High School boys basketball coach also knows that Franklin County could just as easily have been a No. 1 seed after finishing a perfect 12-0 in Region 8-AAA play during the regular season before being upset by Hart County in the region championship game.

The loss to the Bulldogs marked the only setback against a Class AAA team all year for the Lions (22-5), whose only losses outside of that game have come to AAAA schools Cedar Shoals and Ware County, AAAAA Central Gwinnett and TL Hanna out of South Carolina.

Still, after having a solid showing at last week’s Region 6-AAA Tournament at Haralson County, where the Trojans (16-13) finished 3-1 and secured a No. 3 seed, Criswell is confident in his own troops just the same in tonight’s 7 p.m. contest.

“We feel like after last week we played what I thought was four pretty solid games,” Criswell said. “So we feel like we’re coming off a good week and, you know, we’ve had a couple days of good practice in and we feel like we’ll go up there and compete and maybe have a chance to win.”

In order to pull off the upset, though, Carrollton will have to contain the Lions two biggest weapons, the backcourt tandem of 6-foot-3-inch wing guard Demarco Mayfield, who has already committed to the University of Georgia as a junior, and point guard Graham Maxwell.

Both are talented, athletic guards that can get to the rack in a hurry. And while Criswell said Mayfield is the more explosive player, he noted that both can hurt a team in more ways than one.

“Then they’ve got some other role players that bang around on the boards and do some good things, too, so we’ll have to play really, really well to win,” Criswell said.

And for a Trojan team that relies on defense and blue-collar play, banging with the Lions should make for a smash-mouth opening-round battle tonight.

“They get after you on defense, they’re going to play a full-court defensive game,” Criswell said. “They’ll play hard-nosed man-to-man defense, so it’s going to be a challenge for us, especially having to go up there to play.”

In Class A boys action, No. 4 Bremen (7-17) will also be looking to pull an upset, something it fell just short of on back-to-back nights in its region tournament.

After losing a pair of heartbreakers to the top-two ranked teams in the region — Gordon Lee and Trion — Blue Devil coach Billy Pollard saw that his team can go blow for blow with the upper-echelon teams in Class A.

Now that his team is at full strength, the Blue Devils are a dangerous No. 4 seed, something that No. 1 Lakeview Academy (20-8) will have to deal with tonight at 7.

The Lions finished 8-0 in region play during the regular season and swept through their region tournament, as they enter tonight’s contest winners of 14 of their last 15.

The Lions boast some size in their frontcourt, having four players standing 6-foot-3-inches or better.

Bremen will look to its strong guard play to counter the Lions’ inside game, as point guard Clayton McIntosh had an outstanding region tournament after being out with a knee injury for much of the second half of the season.