HIGHLAND – Jersey football coach Jon Adkins probably put it best.
“They’re ranked No. 3 in the state for a reason – there’s no question about that,” Adkins said of Highland and their current Illinois Associated Press Class 5A poll ranking
The Bulldogs certainly showed the Panthers why they are where they are following a 42-7 win in Highland to open their Mississippi Valley Conference slates Friday night; Jersey fell to 1-3 overall, 0-1 in the Valley, while the Bulldogs went to 4-0, 1-0 in the league.
“All phases of the ball game, they flat-out execute,” Adkins said of Highland. “They’re big, they’re strong, they’re fast, they’re smart, they’re well-coached – they have a program that we want to try to emulate; I told my kids, ‘take a look at that because that’s what I want us to become’, and we’re on the right track – I just told the kids, ‘stay the course – that’s going to be us one day.’ But they are certainly No. 3 in the state for a reason.”
The Panthers stood with the Bulldogs for a quarter, entering the second quarter scoreless, but once Highland got some momentum, they were hard to stop.
“They certainly got going,” Adkins said. “They’re a tough offense to stop – they have so many weapons and you can contain them for a little bit, but eventually, they’re going to break out.”
Jersey got close to the Highland goal line in the opening term, but a couple of mistakes kept them from putting points on the board; it could have made a difference had they scored in that situation, Adkins felt. “I told the kids if we scored when we had the ball at the 3-yard line, we go up 7-0 and that’s a whole new ball game,” Adkins said of the inability to score with a big chance early on. “Our defensive guys in the box did very well; I was very happy with the way they played tonight.
“We had the ball on the three-yard line and had a huge holding penalty that took us out of field-goal range; we didn’t execute – that penalty took points off the board and you can’t expect to beat a good ball club when you’re taking points off the board yourself – they capitalized and had the momentum.”
That momentum led to a 21-point burst in the second quarter that started when Garrett Marti fond Brady Feldmann on an 11-yard touchdown pass with 10:41 left in the first half; Feldmann then increased the lead to 13-0 on a five-yard TD burst with 2:51 left in the half and Marti hit Sam LaPorta with a 23-yard TD pass with 55 seconds left to put Highland up 21-0 at the long break.
The backbreaker came early in the third period when Feldmann broke loose for a 74-yard TD run that put the Bulldogs up 28-0; Marti then hit LaPorta for a four-yard TD pass for a 35-0 lead and Bailey Trame rushed in from four yards out late in the third to invoke the running-clock rule. The Panthers refused to fold and Drew Sauerwein hit Blake Wittman with a short pass that Wittman turned into a 33-yard touchdown with 41 seconds left, with Brett Tuttle hitting the convert to make it 42-7.
Feldmann led the Bulldogs with 182 yards on the ground with three TDs while Sauerwein had 42 yards rushing to lead the Panthers; Sauerwein was 17-of-29 for 149 yards and a TD with two interceptions while Marti was 15-of-22 for 176 yards and three TDs and no interceptions. Wittman and Blake Medford each had four catches for JCHS while LaPorta had four receptions for the Bulldogs.
Adkins feels the Panthers are not that far away from breaking loose. “That’s what I told the kids – we’ve been through the wringer, through the fire. We’ve played the 7As (Granite City) and (several ranked teams); we’ve been through the fire now. We’ve got to come back to work and win out and go 6-3 and make the playoffs.”
