Both last season and now, outdoors and indoors, on Saturday afternoons and Friday evenings, no one has yet found a way to stop Bishop Grimes in area eight-man football.
South Lewis found this out as it hosted the Cobras Friday night. Both sides came into the game with 2-0 records, but Grimes used a big first quarter as the springboard for a 58-20 victory over the Falcons.
Any possible concerns that Cobras fans may have possessed started to dissipate when A.J. Burnett threw a 12-yard touchdown pass to T.J. Bradford in the opening minutes.
Burnett, before the first quarter was done, found Nate Gay for a second TD pass, and prior to that Joe Wike scored on a 26-yard run, and that, plus two-point conversions from Taj Tigner and Tyler Wait, made it 22-0 going to the second period.
Even when South Lewis got on the board before halftime, Grimes answered it, Burnett throwing a second TD pass to Bradford, and it was 28-6 going to the break.
The second half belonged to Grimes’ passing game, as Burnett would connect on four more scoring passes, giving him seven for the night. Three of them went to Gay, the other to Bradford.
But while Grimes kept rolling, its two Class A neighbors, East Syracuse Minoa and Jamesville-DeWitt, dealt with close defeats in valiant efforts against top contenders.
In the Spartans’ case, the chance to knock off three-time defending sectional champion Whitesboro was there, especially with a superb defensive effort, yet it still lost 7-0 to the Warriors.
Coming off back-to-back defeats to Vestal and Auburn where it scored just once in each game, ESM would try, in vain, to turn its offense around against a tough, stubborn Whitesboro defense.
Josh Gilkey did gain 100 yards, but it was on 24 carries, and the Spartans, while it threatened several times, could not get it to the end zone.
Against a Whitesboro side that’s no. 10 in the state Class A rankings, ESM got a second-half shutout, only surrendering one drive that the Warriors finished when Nick Sardinia scored from two yards out. Dante Coccagnia set up that score, eventually completing 11 of 19 passes for 97 yards.
J-D, meanwhile, was at Holland Stadium, taking on the same Auburn side that had just handled ESM, and the Red Rams made a furious second-half comeback, but still lost 26-22 to the Maroons.
That it was behind was due to the fact that J-D could not score twice in the first quarter despite two drives inside Auburn’s 20-yard line.
Taking advantage of these missed chances, the Maroons seized the lead in the second period on Quesharr Bowman’s 14-yard TD run, and scored again on Troy Churney’s three-yard pass to Connor Mahunik.
Things got worse for the Rams when Churney threw a 10-yard scoring pass to Lian Schulz, the only points of the third quarter. Trailing 20-0, J-D seemed out of reach, but it was not.
Less than a minute into the fourth quarter, Adam Honis broke up the shutout with a 13-yard scoring pass to Kelvin Hunyh, and the Rams caught a break when a possible Auburn TD was called back due to holding.
Instead, the Rams regained the ball and, with 7:05 left, cut the deficit to 20-16 as Honis, from his own 27, went deep and found Hunyh on a 73-yard scoring connection, also throwing to Huynh for two points.
Less than 90 seconds later, though, Auburn regained some of its margin when Churney threw his third TD pass, 29 yards to Griffin Schoenfelder, and it was needed.
Battling to the end, the Rams scored with 18.4 seconds left on an eight-yard scoring pass from Honis to Pat Murad. All told, Murad threw a career-most 47 passes, completing 19 of them for 342 yards as Huynh had 145 yards on six catches and Murad caught nine of those passes for 136 yards.
