|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Quite a few high school football openers didn’t get played Friday due to unhealthy air quality.
The start of Menlo-Atherton’s game at San Jose City College against Bellarmine was delayed an hour and did not get started until 8 p.m. The folks that stuck around until the conclusion at 11:15 saw a spectacular offensive performance as the two teams combined for 97 points and 1,052 yards of total offense.
It was a back-and-forth battle for most of the game, but Bellarmine dominated the fourth quarter and pulled away for a 56-41 victory.
The Bells scored 29 points in the fourth quarter. They mixed the pass and run early, but went solely to the ground game in the fourth quarter. The 14 plays they ran from scrimmage in the fourth quarter were all on the ground. They scored touchdowns on four of those plays and accumulated 155 of their 385 total yards rushing against an M-A’s defense that was visibly fatigued.
It was a hot evening and more and more M-A players went down with leg cramps as the game progressed.
“We were cramping right and left, obviously we didn’t prepare well to play in this environment,” M-A coach Chris Saunders said.
As the game unfolded it turned into a duel between the Bellarmine ground game and M-A’s aerial attack. Senior quarterback Matt MacLeod completed 16 of 29 passes for 400 yards. Jalen Moss caught nine passes for 156 yards and Jeremiah Earby had five catches for 220 yards and three touchdowns.
The M-A ground game took a blow when Thomas Taufui suffered an elbow injury on his first carry of the game. Dane Fifita did a good job filling in, carrying 14 times for 63 yards and three touchdowns, but the Bears missed their starting running back.
“We had to throw on every play,” Saunders said. “That’s a tough way to play football.”
Bellarmine jumped out to a 14-0 lead in the first nine minutes of the game, but M-A came back strong, scoring three unanswered touchdowns to take a 20-14 lead. Fifita scored on runs of 1 and 5 yards and MacLeod connected with Earby on a 71-yard bomb to put the Bears in the lead.
That was the first of the two times M-A had the lead in the game, and on both occasions Bellarmine immediately responded to regain the upper hand.
The Bells led 21-20 at halftime and made it 27-20 on their first possession of the third quarter, going 75 yards in seven plays. Later in the quarter M-A went on an extended drive of its own, a 90-yard, 10-play possession, with Fifita plunging in from the 3 for his third touchdown. Instead of going for the tie with a kick, the Bears went for two and took the lead as MacLeod ran it in.
The back-and-forth continued as Bellarmine went 64 yards in six plays and M-A responded, needing only three plays to traverse 80 yards with the final 59 coming on a MacLeod pass to Earby.
So it was 35-35 at that point with 10:15 left, but the rest of the game belonged to Bellarmine.
The Bells finished with 527 yards of total offense (385 rushing, 142 passing) while M-A accumulated 525 (400 passing, 125 rushing).
