MIDDLETOWN — Football was a little late arriving at Bill Foltmer Stadium this season. Middletown-brand football, that is. But in Friday night”s second half against visiting Brookside Christian of Stockton, it arrived in full force. Which means, of course,that the Mustangs were thoroughly dominant in a 41-8 victory over the Knights.
Or, as Middletown quarterback Kyle Brown put it, “We finally woke up.” Before that awakening they were 0-2 for only the third time in Foltmer”s lengthy tenure and had just played an unimpressive first half from which they took a tenuous 13-8 lead.
But suddenly alll hell broke loose, as did the Mustangs running backs. Most especially, pony back Drew Tyler, a workhorse force who scored three of the Middletown touchdowns on runs of 2, 5 and 5 yards and racked up 201 yards rushing on 22 totes. A back who started the season third on the Middletown depth chart, Tyler was never better — and, for that matter, no M”town back ever was, as he put on a one-man show with the second-half kickoff.
Drew opened his show with a 37-yard kick return, then added six straight carries, scoring on the sixth from the five. For good measure he kicked the PAT.
Foltmer assigned the Mustangs” slow start this season to inexperience while welcoming the turnaround.
“We just needed a win and to have some good play — something positive to build on going into that first league game (at Lower Lake next Friday),” the Mustang coach said. “We looked sloppy in the first half and then came out and played pretty well.
“It”s just inexperience and then a little bit of … I don”t know, I guess it”s all inexperience,” Foltmer added.
To illustrate, Foltmer referred to a document he was holding with two columns of hyroglyphics, comparing last year”s play chart to this year”s. “We run about a third of what we ran last year,” he said.
After a stunning start in which the Knights scored from 80 yards on their first play from scrimmage — a double reverse winding up with a pass from quarterback Ricky Leos to wideout Javier Rodriguez — they could produce no encore. In fact, only 12 net yards for the rest of the half. Apparently, the Brookside Christian game plan was to pull out all the stops, as evidenced from its onside kick after the initial TD.
The strategy backfired when the Mustangs recovered the kick on the Knights” 45 , then answered the quick score with one of their own, using three plays to go the distance. The team that went to the Division IV state finals in M”town”s place last year had no bullets in its gun. Absent the receiving corps that was there a year ago, Leos couldn”t muster any offense for the rest of the game, his passes sailing over the heads of intended receivers.
Foltmer was correct when he said that the Mustangs should have had a bigger halftime lead. After Middletown drove 55 yards on 9 plays and scored on Tyler”s second TD run, it launched another drive from its 35 and got to the Knight 11. From there, Nick Delia literally wrestled the ball out of the clutches of a Knight defensive back in what looked like a sure touchdown. But the Mustangs came up empty when they were penalized 15 yards by an official who ruled that a Middletown wide receiver had pushed off a defender.
Foltmer was encouraged by the explosive running of Austin Benson and the linebacking work of Adam Cade, both sophomores playing their first varsity game after being promoted from the JVs. Another sophomore callup, Nick Webb, brought up a week earlier, was solid at center, according to Foltmer.
Did this win prove that the Mustangs have truly arrived?
“I think we”ll be alright,” said stalwart Trevor Finley. “If we had the fire we had tonight last week (in a loss to Upper Lake) we”d a won that game. I think with fire we could win every game.”
