The No. 23 Panther football team is two wins away from an Ohio Valley Conference championship and a trip to the I-AA playoffs. But excitement and talk about championships won’t be heard at O’Brien Stadium this week – not with Tennessee Tech coming to town at 1:30 p.m. Saturday.

Panther head coach Bob Spoo said his team hasn’t earned the right to take anyone lightly.

“We can’t be smug about anything,” he said. “We haven’t arrived anywhere at all.”

Defensive coordinator Roc Bellantoni said the Panthers (7-2, 6-0 OVC)

“If we were to look ahead, we’d lose the game Saturday,” Bellantoni said. “That’s the bottom line because we’ve won football games this season because we’ve been prepared and executed on Saturday.”

And a loss Saturday would mean the Panthers would have to travel to and win at Jacksonville State in their final OVC game for Eastern’s first OVC title since 2002.

The Gamecocks are currently tied with Eastern Kentucky for second in the OVC; both teams are 5-1 in the conference.

JSU head coach Jack Crowe has seen his team win four-straight games after a 31-14 home loss to EKU in the second week of the conference season.

“We certainly have aspirations of being in this thing to the very end,” Crowe said. “It wasn’t something we created as an afterthought, it’s how we started the season.”

Jacksonville State, first place in the OVC preseason poll, has a must-win road game of its own Saturday against rival Samford.

Crowe said his team won’t have to concentrate on an OVC title for motivation against an in-state rival.

“The only thing we can control is how we play going into Samford,” Crowe said. “We won’t ever take Samford for granted.”

If Jacksonville State and EKU both win their final two games and Eastern loses to the Gamecocks, the three teams would be tied for first with 7-1 conference records. The trip to the postseason would come down to a coin flip.

But Bellantoni said the Panthers aren’t worried about the future, especially considering they have a job to do in the present.

And if they do their job the next two weeks, they’ll be the team crowned champion.

“I’d much rather be in this position than on the other side, hoping for somebody to lose,” he said. “We just got to go out and take care of business they way have been the last six weeks.”