Football: Bobcats Move To 4-0, With Win Over Raiders (09/16/18)
The Clarion Area Bobcats moved to 4-0 (4-0 District Nine League-Large School), with a 28-15 triumph over the Brookville Raiders, on Friday (September 14th) at Memorial Stadium.
(Photo by Jeff Minich)
Cats set on offense against Raiders
The Cats built a 28-0 lead in the first half and held off the Raiders in the second, to secure the victory.
A seven yard touchdown pass, from Archer Mills to Logan Minich, combined with Mills’ kick for the point after touchdown, had the Bobcats up 7-0, with 2:57 left in the first quarter.
Then with 8:57 on the clock in the second quarter, Minich ran the ball around the left side for a 10 yard touchdown and with the extra point the Bobcats’ lead was extended to 14-0. He had 21 carries on the night for 182 yards, to go along with 2 catches for fourteen yards.
Colton Zacherl intercepted a Raider pass at 7:43 of the second and the Clarion offense set up shop at their own thirty-eight. On the Cats’ first play from scrimmage, Minich took the hand-off, and with some nice moves along the way, ran the ball in for a 66 yard touchdown. Mills’ PAT was successful and the Bobcats led 21-0 with 7:31 left before intermission.
(Photo by Jeff Minich)
Minich Clan, Sam, Jeff, Logan and Jane celebrate big win on twins’ birthdays. Logan was named the Bobcats’ Hager Player of the Game by exploreclarion.com.
But they weren’t done yet. Logan’s twin brother Sam ran the ball in from the inside the Raiders’ one. Mills again was successful; the Cats led 28-0 with twenty-five seconds left before halftime. Sam Minich had 10 carries for 56 yards and three catches for 36 yards for 92 yards in total offense.
Four touchdowns total for the Minich brothers, who were celebrating their 18th birthdays.
Brookville’s first score came at 4:50 of the third quarter, when Robert Keth hit Ian Thrush with a 9 yard scoring pass. Donovan Hoffman kicked the PAT and the Bobcats’ lead was cut to 28-7. Then with 1:10 left in the game Keth hit Thrush again, this time from 4 yards out. The Raiders faked the extra point kick and Kyle MacBeth threw to Thrush to cut the Bobcat lead to 28-15.
Brookville tried an onside kick but the Bobcats recovered it and then ran out the clock.
Mills was 7-for-12 passing for 80 yards, with a touchdown and an interception. He had 7 tackles and an interception and caused a fumble, on defense. He is presently perfect on PATs 15-for-15 and 1-for-1 on field goals.
Nick Porciello and Cutter Boggess led the Cats, on defense with 10 and 9 tackles respectively. Porciello also recovered a fumble.
For the Raiders: Keth was 16-for-27 passing for 158 yards and the two touchdowns and two interceptions. Thrush had 5 catches for 51 yards and Bryan Dworek had 65 yards on eight receptions.
The Bobcats will travel to St. Marys, on Friday (September 21st) to take on the Dutch.
CAT QUOTES
Coach Wiser: I’m a little disappointed, that in the second half we lost our focus a little bit. I guess the upside you want to look at, the half full approach, we haven’t played our best game yet. We played pretty good for a half. I don’t think we committed too many turnovers or had too many penalties in that first half.
Coach Wiser’s grandson Kenny was on hand for Friday’s game.
Overall, we made some moves. We moved Camden (Boggess), who has never played the line, to guard when Greg (Kalinowski) got hurt. And forcing Tyler (McCord Wolbert) to play both ways, isn’t something I like to do, especially for guys on the line. It’s like the rock quarry of any business. Those guys down there just work their butts off. So now you have Cam on both sides of the ball. On defense he was covering their best back; then he turns around and he is on the offensive line.
I hope we come back on Monday, take a look at things we did and take another step at getting better at doing some of this stuff. There were some things we changed off and did pretty well, in the passing game, getting some of the underneath stuff. Brookville did a pretty good job taking away a lot of our deep game. I thought we had to get the ball up in the air. There were a couple of other things I think we probably should have done. We weren’t able to get things going inside… I want to look at film and see what we need to adjust there.
But hey, we’re 4-and-0 right now. We get to enjoy this tonight and tomorrow we’ll start getting ready for St. Marys. We enjoy the journey.
Logan Minich: All week in practice, our line was doing good. They were opening up some holes for me. They sealed the outside really well. Our outside running game was pretty strong tonight.
We kind of came out slow the second half, kind of like we did at Moniteau. So we’ve got to work on that, a little bit. We have to keep coming out strong. That’s pretty much it.
(Thanks to Jeff Minich for his photo and also for his helping me, many games, getting equipment up to and down from the booth. KEEP IT GOING, BOBCATS!!!!)