Though the sense of urgency was quite different between them, the football teams at Fayetteville-Manlius and Christian Brothers Academy each received the same amount of satisfaction from their respective home openers on Friday night.
The Hornets, rebounding from a season-opening loss to Corcoran, got six touchdowns and 341 rushing yards on 32 carries from Jamison Seabury and outscored Henninger 49-38, while the Brothers gradually took control from visiting West Genesee and defeated the Wildcats 35-16.
That it would turn into an offensive slugfest on the turf at F-M was not apparent right away, even when Henninger’s Nasir Jones scored on a 77-yard run in the first quarter.
For the rest of the half, the Hornets’ defense shut the Black Knights down, and after Zack Page scored on a five-yard run, Seabury did the same in the second quarter, the only points for either team.
Up 14-6 at halftime, F-M would see the game’s tenor change when Henninger quarterback Alex Doughty found Spencer Robinson for a 48-yard TD pass early in the third period.
Seabury had a quick response, breaking free on a 77-yard scoring dash and then, minutes later, notching his third TD on a nine-yard run to make it 28-12. Henninger closed the gap before the period ended on Doughty’s 37-yard scoring pass to Isaac Israel-Cruz.
By the fourth quarter, both defenses were getting lit up, but that benefited the Hornets because it kept moving the ball at will and Seabury kept finding the end zone.
A seven-yard TD run was Seabury’s fourth and made it 35-19, but the Black Knights made it tight again when Doughty twice found Israel-Cruz on scoring passes of 15 and 30 yards. Doughty, overall, threw for a Henninger school-record 500 yards, completing 27 of the 40 passes he attempted.
F-M never got into danger, though, because Seabury, buoyed by the blocks of a dominant F-M offensive line, added his fifth and sixth TD’s of the night on runs of 10 and 42 yards. Aside from Seabury’s gaudy numbers, Page ran for 101 yards on 15 carries.
Next on the schedule for F-M is West Genesee, who hoped to follow up its narrow 13-12 Kickoff Classic win over Nottingham at the Carrier Dome by springing an upset at CBA – but the Brothers did not cooperate, despite having played just five days after its own 41-0 win over Henninger in the Dome.
SirVocea Dennis got CBA on the board with the only points of the first quarter on a seven-yard TD pass to Hasan Bridges-Beyah, and threw a 28-yard scoring pass to Malcolm Jackson in the period.
In between, Stevie Scott broke loose on a 42-yard TD run, and the Brothers had a comfortable 21-3 lead by halftime, having still not surrendered a touchdown in six quarters.
That spell was broken when WG’s Liam Barry threw a 20-yard scoring pass to Ben Rustay in the third quarter, but that was sandwiched in between two scoring drives by CBA that Dennis finished with a five-yard TD scramble and a three-yard pass to Bridges-Beyah, which put the game away.
A day after F-M’s visit to West Genesee, CBA goes on the road for a Saturday afternoon game at Elmira. The Express is facing its second Section III opponent in as many weeks, having fallen 26-0 to Baldwinsville last weekend.
