While seven other South Coast football teams have been preparing for specific opponents this week, North Bend and Gold Beach have enjoyed the luxury of bye weeks after winning their league titles.

The Bulldogs won the Far West League and the Panthers took the Big Fir League. They won't know their second-round opponents until after the first round of games today and Saturday.

That means a week spent focusing on themselves.

"We're trying to minimize our weaknesses," Gold Beach coach Kevin Swift said. "We haven't blocked well the last couple games. This week has been back to the basics. It's not so much about who you play, it's about your blocking rules."

North Bend, meanwhile, has been focusing on individual skills.

"We didn't prepare for anybody," Bulldog coach Bill Masei said. "All we did was a lot of individual technique work and a lot of special teams and just general stuff that you have to do regardless of who you play."

After losing after a first-round bye each of the past two years, Masei would rather be playing tonight than going to scout the Hidden Valley at Stayton game - the Bulldogs get the winner next week.

But he said the off week does have its pluses.

"The kids have a three-day break," he said. "Hopefully, they'll come back in on Sunday ready to get back to business."

Some of the players will travel to Eugene to support North Bend's volleyball team in the state tournament. And that's just fine with Masei as long as they come back ready to work when they know their opponent.

"(Starting Sunday) we're going to have to shift gears and refocus," he said. "If we do that, I think we'll be fine."

Gold Beach has had an intense week of practice, though a relaxed one in terms of game preparation because the Panthers don't yet know their opponent, Swift said.

The bye week has been good because the team didn't play up to its potential the final two games of the regular season, he said.

"The intensity is back now," Swift said. "Our practices the last week have been crisp, intense and fun."

Today, the team will travel to Coos Bay to support Reedsport in its game against Amity, Swift said. Then the players will return home for a relaxing weekend while Swift and an assistant will head to the Willamette Valley to scout the game between Dayton and Central Linn that will determine their opponent.

For Gold Beach, being in the playoffs is a new experience. The Panthers haven't been in the postseason since Swift's second season, seven years ago.

"It's been fun," Swift said, adding that the community has come out in full support of the team.

"The bandwagon is officially full. That's good for the kids. But I've pointed out to them as quickly as it fills, it also disappears if we stumble."

Most people around the state will expect Gold Beach to lose if Dayton wins tonight, to many a foregone conclusion.

"Not many people are picking us," Swift said, adding that is just fine with the Panthers.

"The game is not played in the paper or on the Internet, it's played on the field."

As the coach pointed out, to win a state title, the Panthers likely would have to beat Dayton eventually, so they might as well play them right away.

And his players won't be intimidated, especially after then have risen from a no-win season just a couple years ago to the league title this year.

"We're a team that believes we've been through a lot," Swift said. "Nothing is going to scare us. We've seen the dark side. We've made it through alive."

North Bend, on the other hand, is all-too familiar with the first-round bye and would like to reverse the trend that saw the Bulldogs lose to Central two years ago and North Valley last year.

"The last two years, we did play teams that I felt we could have beat," Masei said. "In both games, we started off really slow and rusty and making mistakes we didn't make during the year."

To combat that, the Bulldogs did some full-speed drills and scrimmages during the week and spent time on the two-minute offense.

"We don't want to get rusty and want to make sure (the bye) doesn't throw our momentum off," Masei said. "We have momentum winning five straight and we just want to make sure we keep our focus and keep it going."

Masei also has a particularly good feeling about this team, led by a senior class that wasn't expected to excel like past squads because of the absence of superstars.

"This group of seniors, they had a couple goals and one was to win the league title and the other was to win in the playoffs," he said. "This team has achieved a lot, and we didn't have the big names we had in the past. We've just had kids who have played solid.

"I think they want to make a statement."