Lined up in the same half of the Section III Class A playoff bracket, the East Syracuse-Minoa and Jamesville-DeWitt football teams aimed to face each other in next weekend’s semifinal round – but while the Spartans got there, the Red Rams did not.
Jake Rodman threw four touchdown passes for ESM as it rolled past its fellow Spartans from New Hartford 33-8 in Friday night’s opening round, while the Red Rams fought hard at Whitesboro, yet could not keep up with the Warriors in a 35-13 defeat.
As the top seed out of the Class A American division, ESM entered the playoffs having won four of its previous five games. Rodman made sure that the hot play continued against a New Hartford side that finished fourth in the Class A National division.
All told, Rodman threw 26 passes, completing 16 of them for 222 yards, and right from the outset he put New Hartford’s secondary in bad spots, which led to scoring plays.
During the first quarter, ESM moved it to New Hartford’s 20-yard line, from where Rodman threw to the end zone and found Jeremy Perry for the game’s first points.
It got even better in the second quarter, where twice ESM moved into scoring position and, twice, Rodman would throw lengthy TD passes, finding Brandon Breen in the end zone from 20 yards out and then tossing a 25-yard scoring pass to DeShaun Gorman.
Those plays, plus a pair of Jeff Ryan extra points, boosted ESM to a 20-0 halftime lead, but Rodman still wasn’t done. Getting nice protection from his offensive line, Rodman threw a fourth TD pass to a fourth different receiver, hitting Brandon Santillo from 18 yards out in the third quarter.
All the while, ESM’s defense was terrific, too, constantly plugging holes and not letting New Hartford’s attack get going. It pitched a shutout until Dominick Pfisterio’s five-yard TD run in the fourth quarter, answered when K’Hari Flagg ran 21 yards for ESM’s lone TD run of the night.
This sends ESM into the sectional semifinals against Whitesboro, who took a far different tact than the Spartans did to upend a J-D side that had played the Warriors tough in a 24-21 home defeat back on Sept. 12.
Mostly, Whitesboro pounded away with its ground game, led by running back Travis Eberley, who scored on short runs of three and five yards in the first quarter, with a Red Rams scoring drive capped by Joe Murphy’s one-yard TD plunge sandwiched in between.
That first TD was set up by Collin Stewart intercepting Murphy’s pass on the game’s opening play. And though the Rams answered with a 14-play, 80-yard march capped by Murphy scoring, Whitsboro promptly issued its own 11-play drive, all runs, leading to Eberely’s second score.
Whitesboro took control in the game’s middle stages, blanking the Rams in the second and third periods and gaining a 28-7 edge as Eberley scored twice more, each time on runs of five yards.
The first of those scored came during a penalty-filled second quarter. Then, to open the third period, the Warriors, up 21-7, used nearly eight minutes of clock to wear J-D down before Eberley found the end zone for the fourth time.
As it had done all season, J-D battled to the finish, Jhakeer Jamison scoring on a one-yard plunge on the first play of the fourth quarter at the end of an 11-play, 80-yard drive, but the Rams would not find the end zone again. Mike Cirasuolo capped the Warriors’ effort with a 10-yard TD run in the final minute.
This sets up a sectional semifinal between ESM and Whitesboro, and the big story was that the Warriors could be without Eberley, who left the J-D game late with an injury suffered while playing defense after rushing for 115 yards on 15 carries, while the Rams’ Ernest Shaw had 90 yards on 17 carries.
Facing a less-than-full-strength Whitesboro roster gives the Spartans (who beat the Warriors to earn its last sectional title in 2011) a better chance to prevail and advance to the Nov. 7 Class A title game at the Carrier Dome against Indian River or Carthage, as that pair stage a rematch of the 2013 title game in the other semifinal.
