Wildcats dominate Tigers in playoff game

By JON KLEINKNECHT

Inquirer Sports Editor

sports@galioninquirer.com

RICHWOOD — The unde­feated North Union Wild­cats (11–0) piled up 517 yards of total offense — 435 rush­ing — in a 40–21 rout of the Galion Tigers (9–2) in a Divi­sion IV regional quar­ter­fi­nal play­off game here last night.

The Wild­cats never trailed. After return­ing the open­ing kick­off 12 yards to their own 27-yard line, they needed just two plays to cover the remain­ing 73 yards.

Aver­ag­ing a mere six passes a game enter­ing the con­test, North Union caught the Tigers off guard with a 46-yard com­ple­tion on a roll­out on their first play. Kam Smith then took a hand­off and raced 27 yards for a touch­down. A Daniel Barr con­ver­sion kick made it 7–0.

Unde­terred, the Orange-and-Blue wasted lit­tle time in responding.

On their first play, quar­ter­back Austin Prosser hit wide receiver Dareian Watkins in stride with a long pass that resulted in a 67-yard touch­down con­nec­tion. Con­nor Kempf’s extra point kick tied the score at 7–7.

Seven min­utes after­wards, the Wild­cats went up 14–7 via a 36-yard TD pass from quar­ter­back Dustin Crab­tree to Nate Curts and another Barr PAT kick.

Less than three min­utes later, Smith tore through the Galion defense for a 65-yard touch­down jaunt on a reverse play. Barr’s third PAT of the open­ing period made it 21–7.

At the 5:27 mark of the sec­ond frame, the Orange-and-Blue cut the deficit to 21–13 on a 7-yard, six-point romp up the mid­dle by David Nay. The ensu­ing con­ver­sion kick was no good.

North Union got the points back less than two min­utes later when Thane Hoff­man romped into the end­zone from 12 yards out, cul­mi­nat­ing a drive of 61 yards in just four plays — all being gains of at least 12 yards.

Galion fol­lowed with a three-and-out on its next possession.

On a first-and-10 play from their own 28, the Wild­cats made it 33–13 as Hoff­man blis­tered the Tigers for a 72-yard pay­dirt gal­lop on a reverse. The PAT kick was no good, but the hosts took a com­mand­ing 33–13 lead into the lock­er­room at halftime.

In the first two quar­ters, the win­ners ham­mered the Tigers for 411 yards in offense — 329 rush­ing on only 23 car­ries, a norm of 14.3 yards-per-attempt — plus com­plet­ing 4-of-4 passes for 82 stripes. Galion man­aged a mere 36 yards rush­ing on 16 tries and com­pleted 6-of-11 passes for 99 stripes and had one pass intercepted.

The Tigers cut the gap to 33–21 at 5:45 of the third stanza when Nay shot through off tackle for a 16-yard TD scam­per. Watkins fol­lowed with a 2-point con­ver­sion run.

But, the hosts put the icing on the cake chew­ing nearly six min­utes off the clock in the final period, fin­ish­ing with a 13-yard run for six points by Smith on a left-side sweep with 5:23 left. Barr’s ensu­ing con­ver­sion kick was good, account­ing for the final score.

“I’ll be hon­est. They’re good, but it shocked me what they did to our defense,” said Galion head coach Chris Hawkins. “I thought 21 points would win tonight. If you’d told me we’d score 21, I’d said, ‘Good. We’re going to week 12.’”

“I think the dif­fer­ence tonight was the line of scrim­mage,” he added. “Their offen­sive line was the dif­fer­ence in the game. Plus, we were ask­ing our offen­sive line to block the best front four we’ve faced in three years.”

Final sta­tis­tics had the Tigers gain­ing only 63 yards on 32 car­ries. They also com­pleted 12-of-22 passes for 164 mark­ers for 227 yards in offense.

North Union aver­aged nearly 10 yards per rush­ing attempt with 435 stripes on 44 attempts. That includes minus-2 on the final two plays of the game which were vic­tory for­ma­tion kneel downs inside the Galion 10. The vic­tors were 4-for-6 pass­ing for 82 yards. All four com­ple­tions were in the first half.

Enter­ing the game aver­ag­ing almost 45 points per Fri­day night and more than 300 yards a game on the ground, the Wild­cats’ offense fea­tures three run­ning backs who all gained more than 800 yards dur­ing the reg­u­lar sea­son. Smith vic­tim­ized the Tigers for 208 yards on 15 car­ries. Hoff­man added 149 on only 11 attempts, while full­back Jake Blevins totaled 61 via 12 rushes in the phys­i­cal, Wing-T offense.

Indi­vid­u­ally for Galion, Prosser net­ted 26 yards rush­ing on 14 tries, Nay had 25 on 12; Watkins, 12 on 5 runs; and Anto­nio Bur­ket, 1 carry for no yards.

Prosser was 12-for-20 pass­ing for 164 yards and was picked off once. Watkins was zero-for-2 throw­ing the ball.

Watkins led Galion’s receivers with 9 catches for 141 yards. Nay had 3 recep­tions for 23 stripes.

“Now that the sea­son has con­cluded, we can sit back and reflect on what we’ve done,” Hawkins stated and men­tion­ing the Tigers achieved their first two goals of the sea­son — win­ning an out­right North Cen­tral Con­fer­ence cham­pi­onship and mak­ing the play­offs. “We’re los­ing a great senior class.”

This is the fourth year in a row North Union has made the playoffs.

Last night’s play­off vic­tory was the first in school history.

Mem­bers of the Mid Ohio Ath­letic Con­fer­ence — the same league the Tigers will be join­ing in two years — the Wild­cats have a record of 47–7 under fifth-year head coach Jesse Miller, a win­ning per­cent­age of .870. They will play unde­feated and top-ranked Colum­bus Bishop Hart­ley next Fri­day in a regional semi­fi­nal bat­tle. Hart­ley pounded Upper San­dusky (7–4) 63–19 last night.

Posted by Jon Kleinknecht on Nov 3 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.