Rob Grant — Special to the Record-Bee
MIDDLETOWN — If the game would have been decided by the breaks — and not the breakdowns — Middletown”s lightly experienced Mustangs might have came away from their opening foray into the 2007 season with a win over Salesian on Friday night.
Lord knows the ball and the penalty flags bounced their way enough times. Consider that Salesian had 15 points — two touchdowns and a field goal — negated by penalties.
But the Chieftans scored enough points that stayed on the scoreboard to notch a 27-12 victory at Middletown.
The principle breakdowns came against senior wideout John Wheat, who turned three receptions from Chieftans senior quarterback Josh Smith into touchdowns of 60, 17 and 25 yards and overall had 118 yards on five receptions.
“We had a lot of penalties and things go our way,” Mustang coach Bill Foltmer acknowledged. “But we had a lot of inconsistencies. Sometimes the kids played well and there were other times when maybe they didn”t play so well.
“And I”m a little concerned about how soft we were up front both offensively and defensively. We got beat by athleticism.” Foltmer added. “You play bump and run and they just run right by you. You back off and they run underneath you.”
Consequently, after the first chapter of the mystery that is the ”07 Mustangs is still just that — a mystery.
While losing to a bigger, faster and exceedingly more experienced Salesian team by a couple of TDs and staying in the game for the better part of three quarters is no disgrace, Foltmer tempered his estimation on what happens as the season progresses.
“We”ll see what this loss means, what Salesian goes on and does and what we go on and do. If they kick everybody”s ass the rest of the season, maybe this wasn”t too bad,” he said.
One Mustang who appears to have a pretty good future ahead is 6-foot-2, 180-pound sophomore receiver Dylan Galusha — if only because he had a pretty good present — or if you prefer presence — on Friday night. Galusha scored both Middletown touchdowns on electrifying long receptions of 81 and 73 yards. Both came at unusual intervals. The first was on the last play of the first quarter, when Galusha took a pass of 11 yards from Middletown quarterback Matt Outen at the Mustang 30 and then simply won a footrace against the Salesian secondary.
The play turned out to be the single highlight of the game for Middletown, which moved into a tie at 6 and was a response to Wheat”s 60-yard TD reception earlier in the period.
It looked momentarily as if things might even go in the Mustangs” direction after that. Salesian moved 57 yards on 11 plays to the Middletown 10 following Galusha”s first score. The Chieftains, penalized 50 yards during the second period, had a TD called back on a procedure penalty, then had a 22-yard field goal by Wheat negated by an illegal shift.
But Outen was sacked at the Salesian 43 to end any notion of Middletown moving ahead and Salesian scored three plays later to take a 14-6 lead.
The Chieftains went up 20-6 late in the first half on another Smith-to-Wheat touchdown.
The last hurrah for Middletown came on their first play from scrimmage opening the second half when Galusha took another pass from Outen 73 yards, needing to juke only one Salesian defender en route.
The Mustangs could do nothing after recovering a kickoff that the Chieftains lost at their own 23-yard line. And after the Chieftains lost an 81-yard touchdown to a clipping penalty, they put the capper on it with Wheat”s final TD reception with 10:36 remaining.
“When you”re small and young, it was just tough out there,” Foltmer summarized. “The line made mistakes and you got young linebackers behind them. But I did think that the two — (Tyler ) Owen and (Eric) Tomko — played pretty well.”
