Pirates struggle on offense against Centerburg

By ROB HAMILTON

After grad­u­at­ing many of their skill play­ers, includ­ing the conference’s top run­ning back in Blair Wol­cott, the Card­ing­ton Pirates fig­ured it’d take time for their offense to gel this season.

Those grow­ing pains were on dis­play when the team hosted Cen­ter­burg on Fri­day, as the Pirates were held to three first downs and a field goal in a 28–3 loss.

“Cen­ter­burg did a heck of a job,” said Card­ing­ton coach Bran­don Dodrill. “They’re fast, big and strong. Those kids played their tail off — their guys up front prob­a­bly won them the game. We were fly­ing around, but just couldn’t win the bat­tle up front.”

Centerburg’s defen­sive line made it hard for the Pirates to either run or pass the ball — and squan­dered a cou­ple of great plays by the Card­ing­ton ‘D’.

After going three-and-out on their first pos­ses­sion, the Pirates got the ball back on the Tro­jan 39 after an inter­cep­tion by Tyler Dor­nan. How­ever, in three plays, Card­ing­ton moved back­wards five yards and was forced to punt.

Cen­ter­burg imme­di­ately fum­bled the ball, which was recov­ered by Dor­nan. Card­ing­ton started from the Tro­jan 15, but three run­ning plays only moved them to the eight.

The Pirates still got points off this turnover, as Colton Jenk­ins was able to drill a 25-yard field goal to give them the lead just over six min­utes into the game.

Unfor­tu­nately for Card­ing­ton, they weren’t able to stop Cen­ter­burg with a timely turnover on their next pos­ses­sion. A 42-yard run by quar­ter­back Tyler Stoyle got them in the Pirate red zone and Joey Valen­tine fol­lowed with a one-yard scor­ing dive three plays later. Brett Sock­man fol­lowed with the first of four suc­cess­ful point-after kicks to give his team a 7–3 lead with 4:19 to go in the first.

Cen­ter­burg threat­ened on their next pos­ses­sion, mov­ing the ball inside the red zone again before a penalty and sack con­spired to move them out of scor­ing range.

Unfor­tu­nately for the Pirates, they were unable to move the ball offen­sively and the Tro­jan offense was even­tu­ally able to cap­i­tal­ize on its opportunities.

After tak­ing over on their 37 after a Card­ing­ton punt with four min­utes to go in the half, the Tro­jans held the ball for 12 plays and scored on a Stoyle dive with only three sec­onds to go in the half to expand their lead to a 14–3 margin.

“We just couldn’t move the ball and couldn’t get that push,” said Dodrill. “We got two turnovers and only got three points…we couldn’t capitalize.”

The Pirate prob­lems were com­pounded in the third quar­ter by a turnover of their own, as quar­ter­back Dustin Blan­ton coughed up the ball while being sacked and a Tro­jan defender scooped it up and ran 30 yards for a touchdown.

Cen­ter­burg added one more score in the fourth quar­ter and went on to win by a 25-point margin.

Char­lie Miller ran for 52 yards, while Blan­ton com­pleted a 13-yard pass to Pey­ton Bar­nett, but the Pirates weren’t able to sus­tain dri­ves in the loss.

Dodrill noted that he was pleased with the effort, but just feels the exe­cu­tion needs to be better.

“I’m not dis­ap­pointed in the kids at all,” he said. “We played hard, but just couldn’t exe­cute offen­sively this evening.”

Posted by Rob Hamilton on Aug 29 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.