A week after their hard-fought battle for first place in the Class A American division, the East Syracuse-Minoa and Jamesville-DeWitt football teams both found plenty of success against their next foes.
The Spartans, no. 20 in the latest state Class A rankings, moved to 5-1 with a 58-33 victory over Fulton Friday night, while the Red Rams pulled away from visiting Albany Academy 35-17 Saturday afternoon to improve its record to 4-2.
ESM was all too happy to see Fulton after J-D’s defense held them to a season-low 14 points, a number that the Spartans passed against the Red Raiders by the time the first quarter was done.
Quarterback Sean Richardson began his big night by throwing a 35-yard touchdown pass to Pat Bryant early in the first quarter. The next time ESM had the ball, it moved to the one-yard line, from where K’Hari Flagg scored, and Fred Johnson added a six-yard TD run to make it 19-6.
Fulton showed some resolve in the second period, scoring twice on Mark Pollock’s 61-yard run and Cody Green’s 13-yard pass to Chris Jones. And the Red Raiders still lost ground because its defense could not stop anything ESM threw at them.
Richardson would tack on two more scoring passes before halftime, both times finding Anthony Townsend on plays that covered 15 and 30 yards, with Richardson tacking on a six-yard TD run as the Spartans took a 39-21 lead to the break.
Any doubts about the outcome were erased when Richardson ran 18 yards for one score in the third quarter and, from his own 10-yard line, went deep to find Bryant on a 90-yard TD reception. Jose Sanchez also found the end zone on an 11-yard run.
All told, Richardson threw 23 passes, completing 12 of them for 345 yards. Bryant accumulated 198 receiving yards on just four completions.
J-D didn’t prove as stingy against Albany Academy as it was in the J-D clash, but didn’t need to be, either, as it used 21 unanswered points in the second and third periods to get away from the Cadets.
Fullback Ben Honis put the Rams on the board with a 20-yard TD run in the first quarter, with Albany Academy answering as Ryan Anderson drilled a 29-yard field goal. But that would be the Cadets’ last points until the fourth quarter.
The Rams’ patient flex-option offense put together one scoring drive in the second period, Nate Shapiro going 22 yards for the score to make it 14-3 going into halftime.
Then Shapiro scored a second time on a three-yard run in the third quarter before James Jones broke the game open with a 51-yard sprint to the end zone that made it 28-3. Ernest Shaw tacked on a one-yard scoring run in the final period.
While J-D closes its regular season against Fowler at the Corcoran High School Stadium this Friday, ESM will need to defeat Nottingham (2-1 league, 2-4 overall) in order to lock up the outright Class A American division regular-season championship.
