Galion defense smothers Upper Sandusky

By JON KLEINKNECHT

Inquirer Sports Editor

sports@galioninquirer.com

UPPER SANDUSKY — Galion’s defense pitched a shutout and held Upper San­dusky to less than 100 yards in total offense in a 28–0 win here Fri­day night.

The win came in the open­ing round of North Cen­tral Con­fer­ence play and is the third straight for the Tigers since los­ing their season-opener. The Rams drop to 2–2 overall.

The clos­est the Rams got the ball to the goal line was the Galion 26-yard line with less than three min­utes to play. The Orange-and-Blue fea­tured a smoth­er­ing defense that lim­ited the hosts to just 93 yards in 53 plays — with 36 of the stripes com­ing on one play.

“I’ve been say­ing all along that the strength of our team is our defense,” a smil­ing Galion head coach Chris Hawkins said after the vic­tory. “We return 10 starters from a great defense from last year.”

He con­tin­ued, “I am very proud of our sec­ondary tonight. That’s the best pass cov­er­age we’ve done in a long time.”

The Tigers lim­ited Upper San­dusky quar­ter­back Tylor Pritchard to just 5 com­ple­tions in 18 attempts for 43 yards. They inter­cepted him once. Pritchard entered the game hav­ing com­pleted 60.3 per­cent of 68 passes for 443 yards in the Rams’ first three games.

They didn’t just keep Pritchard from throw­ing the ball, though. After rush­ing for 280 yards and aver­ag­ing 5.7 yards-per-carry in the first three games, Pritchard fin­ished with minus-17 stripes on 20 rushes against the Tigers. In his first 3 car­ries, he net­ted 33 yards. In his final 17, he was dumped for minus-50.

Will Adelsperger led the Rams in rush­ing with 72 yards on 14 car­ries. Upper net­ted only 50 yards on 35 rushes.

Offen­sively, the Tigers churned out 263 yards in 52 plays. Touch­downs came on a 6-yard David Nay run in the open­ing quar­ter, a 1-yard quar­ter­back keeper by Dareian Watkins in the final min­utes of the first half, a spec­tac­u­lar 66-yard pay­dirt burst by Watkins in the third period, and a 1-yard plunge by Watkins in the final stanza. Watkins added a 2-point con­ver­sion run and the Tigers scored two more points via a safety in the fourth period. The win­ners were zero-for-3 in extra-point kicks.

“To come here and play a very good foot­ball team and beat them 28–0 — even though we made a lot of mis­takes — is a good win,” stated Hawkins. One thing I’m not happy about is us putting the ball on the ground. Fum­bles are inex­cus­able. The ball being on the ground is never acceptable.”

The Orange-and-Blue had 4 fum­bles against the Rams.

Nay led the Tigers in rush­ing with 105 yards on 20 carries.

Watkins added 84 stripes on 17 car­ries, includ­ing 2 car­ries for minus-2 yards by kneel­ing down with the ball on the final two plays of the game. He com­pleted 6-of-10 passes for 69 yards and was inter­cepted once.

Anto­nio Bur­ket had 2 car­ries for 4 yards, and Austin Prosser, 1 for 1. Prosser was 0-for-2 pass­ing the ball.

Austin Chap­lin was the Tigers’ lead­ing receiver with 3 recep­tions for 52 yards. Jer­maine caught one throw for 9, and Nay had 2 snags for 8 markers.

“We’ve got a lot of things to work on, but we’re one of only half the teams in the NCC who are 1–0 after tonight,” men­tioned Hawkins.

TIGER BITES: Prosser aver­aged 13 yards on 3 punt returns. … Chap­lin punted 4 times for a norm of 37 yards per boot.

Posted by Jon Kleinknecht on Sep 15 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.