Banged up all season, but showing a lot of heart, the Skaneateles football team still made it into the Section III Class B playoffs as the fourth-place finisher in the B West division.
Yet it led to an impossible first-round playoff assignment – namely, a trip to Buckley-Volo Field Saturday to run headlong into unbeaten, state no. 3-ranked, two-time defending sectional champion Cazenovia, who proved again its worth by beating the visiting Lakers 56-8.
Whatever hopes Skaneateles may have possessed going into the game hinged on Cazenovia making all kinds of mistakes, from penalties to turnovers, which it did in the first quarter – and still grabbed a 14-0 lead.
There was, on Cazenovia’s opening possession, a touchdown run called back on a holding penalty and another scoring pass from Keaton Ackermann to Alex Devine that was dropped in the end zone, all part of a no-huddle spread that Cazenovia used throughout the first half.
Those were just hiccups, though, and the next time Cazenovia had the ball, Dan Phillips broke free on a 33-yard run to set up his own seven-yard TD dash. Before the period ended, it was 14-0 as, after a bad Skaneateles punt snap deep in its own territory, Ackermann found T.J. Connellan on a 19-yard scoring pass and added his second straight extra point.
Both through the air and on the ground, Ackermann helped lead the second-quarter runaway. His 39-yard scramble set up a second TD pass to Connellan on a slant, this one of 18 yards.
Three minutes later, it was 27-0, with Ackermann hitting Jake Wozniak from 13 yards out for the score. Pete DeCew intercepted Griffin Lawson on the next Skaneateles possession, leading to Ackermann’s fourth scoring pass, a 14-yard strike to a wide-open Sam Langan.
More of Cazenovia’s air attack showed itself right before halftime, Ackermann finding Jake Shaffner for 22 yards and Paul McLaughlin for 14 yards on another scoring drive that Ackermann himself finished with a four-yard jaunt to the end zone.
With the score 41-0 at halftime, and the game in hand, they used a running clock in the second half, though Ackermann scored again on a 15-yard run before Skaneateles, who fell to 3-5, finally got on the board on Lawson’s short TD run with 7:43 left.
