Oswego pulls reverse on Waubonsie Valley
The way Waubonsie Valley football coach Paul Murphy put it, his team’s last game against Oswego nine weeks ago was a “season ago.”
Unfortunately for the Warriors (8-3), a lot has changed since that last meeting. So while Waubonsie Valley piled up tons of yards and 40 points in that regular-season victory in Aurora, it was a totally different story Saturday night in Oswego as the fourth-seeded Panthers surprised the visitors with a 33-13 defeat in the second round of the Class 8A playoffs.
This time around it was Oswego — which will take a nine-game winning streak into a quarterfinal matchup with Marist next week — that controlled the lines of scrimmage on both sides of the ball and amassed gaudy numbers on the ground, jumping ahead 20-0 and never really letting the Warriors’ explosive offense get on track.
“I think that’s always a fear as a coach that you beat them once and you think it’ll be easy the second time, but you get to the playoffs and it was nine games ago. That’s a full season ago,” Murphy said. “We were playing an entirely different team than we did nine weeks ago.”
Back in that Week 2 game, Panthers senior Bryce Holm was a star linebacker who was not a focal point on offense. On Saturday he was a two-way star, and he gained 239 yards on 15 carries, including a 68-yard run that gave Oswego a 7-0 lead after a scoreless first quarter.
The Panthers defense, meanwhile, contained the Warriors potent ground attack and added a score of its own when linebacker Sean Graff intercepted a Jack Eddy pass and returned it 54 yards to give the hosts a 14-0 lead with 4:06 left in the first half. It was 20-0 before the Warriors finally got on the board on a 7-yard pass from Eddy to Christian Gibbs in the final seconds of the first half.
The score seemed to give the fifth-seeded Warriors hope, but not even a pair of defensive stops to start the third quarter could help them close the gap as the Panthers defense held firm. When quarterback Steven Frank connected with CJ Brown for his second TD toss of the game, it was 26-7 late in the third quarter and the Panthers were closing in on their first quarterfinal berth since 2006.
“We just didn’t really take advantage of our opportunities,” said Gibbs, who caught 8 passes for 76 yards in his final game with the Warriors before heading off to play at Illinois State, where he will become a teammate of Holm, his nemesis Saturday. “We beat them before and we kind of expected the same team, but they were a lot better than before.”
Warriors linebacker Hugh Griffin echoed Gibbs’ sentiments.
“They brought out their A game,” he said. “We thought we beat them one time and we would beat them again and that’s not the case. It hurts a lot. Tonight we just couldn’t put the pieces of the puzzle together.”
Warriors running back Jon Fizer gained 92 yards, but Oswego’s defense made him earn every one of them, and as a team Waubonsie had just 97 yards on the ground and just two carries that gained double digits.
The Panthers, meanwhile, had 97 yards from Tyler Walsh, Holm’s total of 239, and 23 more from Frank, who added a 9-yard score on a keeper in the second half.