MIDDLETOWN — Middletown fullback Jake Davis says he has already gone through three pairs of shoes in this young season. Surely one pair alone was was worn out in Friday night”s game against Upper Lake. Stomping on people tends to be hard on footwear.
But Davis, who scored three touchdowns in the Mustangs” 62-0 win on runs of 38, 6 and 55 yards wasn”t the only Middletown player who burned up some leather.
Another Davis — John — also scored three times. It seemed like everybody in purple got into the act.
Before the first half ended, Mustang coach Bill Foltmer had resorted to having a tackle running off tackle. Needless to say, perhaps, he scored, too. Brian Holt ran it in from the 12 and added the subsequent 2-point PAT. Jereomy Hoefer, one of the second-team M-towners who played the entire second half, scored on consecutive plays from near the midstripe after his first run was nullified by a penalty.
By halftime, only an excavation team could have located the Cougars, who were down 50-0 at that point. In that brief spate of time the Mustangs scored seven touchdowns on a total of 19 plays. They needed only eight plays to score their first three touchdowns en route to a 28-zip first quarter lead. What they did to the Cougars would have got them arrested for mayhem if it had happened on a street instead of a football field.
A cumulative look at what happened to Upper Lake in that period:
— They had four turnovers, three of them interceptions of Mike Cox passes. One of the picks was returned a 67 yards for a TD by John Davis. The two Upper Lake quarterbacks managed only one completion, that for a net minus of two yards.
— Of the other nine times the Cougars put the ball in play they had four three and outs.
— The Cougars threatened only once, moving to the Mustang 14 with 9:43 remaining. But the threat ended in a fumble recovered by Terry Brierly, followed by another Middletown TD.
They crossed the midstripe only once in the first half.
The final score of the rout matched one the Mustangs rang up against Kelseyville last year and defied description. Certainly for Mustang coach Bill Foltmer who attempted vainly to make some sense of it.
“We got to see some of the kids who weren”t playing,” he observed. “We jumped on them early,” he said. “We did a good job of executing and played pretty solid,” he added.
If the Mustangs were at full strength, which they weren”t Friday night, they would be even more than scary good.
“We are Mustang lite,” Foltmer quipped during the pre-game, alluding to the absence of seven starters because of (1) the flu, (2) a player injured in a fight, (3) appendicitis, (4) staff disease, (5) a knee, (6) a broken leg, and (7) missing two practices.
The most noticeable absence was that of sure-handed receiver and sure-footed /kicker/punter Danny Beckwith, arguably the Mustangs” franchise player, who was the one suffering from the flu.
