OTIS ­— The Otis-Bison High School football team shut out Stafford in an Eight-Man Division-II game that saw 10 Otis-Bison players record positive yards on offense.
Of the 10 Cougars, seven recorded touchdowns. In fact, the only player on Otis-Bison team to have more than one touchdown was quarterback Trevor Keller, who hit three receivers for touchdowns.
Otis-Bison beat Stafford 46-0 after only 24 minutes due to the mercy rule.
“I thought we played well,” Cougars head coach Travis Starr said. “We came out and executed and that is what we wanted to see here.”
The Cougars won the coin toss and elected to receive the ball,. Their first drive was their second-longest drive of the game.
The Cougars traveled 52 yards on six plays, taking less than two minutes off the clock to go ahead of the Trojans 8-0 on a 21-yard pass to Cornwell and a Patrick Piper run for the 2-point conversion.
The Trojans tried to establish a passing game on their first drive, but the Cougars put too much pressure on quarterback Alex Setter, who extended the Trojans’ plays by scrambling from the pocket. He threw 11 incomplete passes in the game.
“We lined up pretty good against the run,” Starr said of his defense, which gave up 77 yards to the Trojans. “Obviously, we need to defend against the scrambling quarterback a little better. Overall ,the pass defense and run defense, I was very pleased with.”
The Cougars took the ball after Stafford’s three-and-out and ran one play from scrimmage, a 29-yard touchdeown bomb to Matthew Crottinger, to raise the lead to 15 after the extra point from Michael Hlavaty.
“A couple of the big plays were passing plays, where there was no pressure on the quarterback,” Trojans head coach Jeff Lowther said of his defense. “So we need to pressure the quarterback. If we quarterbacks all day, they will hit open receivers, which they did.”
After a penalty and a couple of incomplete passes, the Trojans’ offense was off the field and the Cougars got the ball 38 yards from the goal line.
“I know we could have played better, but I know that that’s a very good team with Otis-Bison as well,” Lowther said. “There’s some things we could have done differently that would have improved our outcome tonight.”
Keller completed a 25-yard pass to Brandon Pechanec, and then got sacked by Stafford’s 201-pound freshman, Tristin Paulsen, for a 2-yard loss.
The Cougars followed the sack with a 13-yard run into the end zone by Dylan Wissman.
After a fake field-goal attempt is run into the end zone by Setter for a score, the Cougars went up 23-0.
The Trojans had three first downs on their next drive, one after an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty against a Cougars player for wearing a homecoming bracelet onto the field. But they were unable to convert on a fourth-and-16 play, giving the ball back to the Cougars.
The next play was a 37-yard touchdown pass to Jacob Crottinger. The extra point was good to make the score 30-0.
The Trojans looked as though they had found offensive life after a 5-yard run by Setter followed by a 35-yard connection form Setter to Ross Harris.
Two plays later, the Trojans turned the ball over on a fumbled pitch, which was recovered by Dominic Manley of the Cougars.
Otis-Bison did what it had been doing all night. One play for 54-yard touchdown run from Hlavaty, and the extra point, also from Hlavaty, put the Cougars up 37-0.
The Cougars’ defense, which has given up six points in four games, forced another three-and-out to give Otis-Bison the ball 33 yards from the goal line.
The Cougars scored again on a 17-yard run from Devon King to take a 43-0 lead.
That was all in the first quarter.
The Cougars took the ball back from the Trojans with 12 seconds left in the first quarter and ran its longest drive of the evening.
The drive was carried on the feet of King, who gained 23 yards, and Justus Bartonek, who ran for 45 yards to drive the Cougars’ own 30-yard line and set up a Hlavaty field goal, taking 8:39 off of the clock in the process.
The Trojans got the ball with 3:23 left on the clock and needed a touchdown to continue the game into the second half. Stafford took the ball from its own 21-yard line and drove into Cougars’ territory, but Matthew Demel came up with a big sack for the Cougars on a fourth-and-6 situation.
“I just wanted to get something positive out of the game,” Lowther said. “I thought it was good that our kids continued to fight hard and we still obviously wanted to move the ball and get a score and keep it going beyond halftime but we weren’t able to do that.”
With 30 seconds left in the game, the Trojans got a little life back when Paulsen recovered a fumbled snap by freshman quarterback Kole Urban.
“You don’t want to see the fumble there obviously, but you really don’t want to see a pass sail over your head to extend it,” Starr said.
The Trojans had time for one play, which ended with a second sack for Demel to end the game.