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The B South playoffs go...chalk?
More than anything else, a football season is a war of attrition. Winning a title is often a question of just how many breaks you get or how many bad breaks you don't get and the biggest break of all can be health. Everyone's banged up in late October, that's inevitable. But how you respond to injuries can be the thing that extends your season.
So when Falmouth quarterback Micah Derrig broke his collarbone last week against Greely, it set up a quarterfinal matchup of backup quarterbacks. Westbrook, of course, had been without their starting QB, Hunter Hall, for the majority of the year.
It's a little fitting that in the wild ride that has been B South, we'd have a playoff game where both teams are missing their starting QB. Why not?
Westbrook struck first when Lucas Roberson took the opening kickoff home.
Westbrook took that lead into the second quarter, when Owen Ross put Falmouth on the board. Then the Navs' QB, Harper Drosdik, scored from the 1 to give Falmouth the lead.
Falmouth followed this up with an onside kick and added a Theo Roediger FG before the half to make it 17-7. Westbrook added a Thomas Coleman touchdown to get within 3, but Roediger got an INT and another FG. Westbrook had two more chances, but Falmouth twice stopped the Blazes on downs in the final 4 minutes and we'll have a new champion this year in Class B.
After the game, I spoke to Drosdik.
There were fewer people than you'd expect in Falmouth for a playoff game because the 11th seeded boys soccer team was in Scarborough against the defending champs. When, at halftime, the 2-1 Falmouth lead was announced over the PA system, a cheer went up from the crowd.
Scarborough would tie it at 2 and it went to penalty kicks. The Navs converted all 5 of theirs to 3 of Scarborough and the Cinderella story continues.
It's not often a school knocks out two defending champs on the same day.
Michael Hoffer
On the other side of the B South bracket, in the span of 3 weeks I'd gone from thinking Cheverus was done to talking myself into thinking they can win the region. Such is the joy of B South this year. Just last week the Stags had smoked Biddeford and surely that would give them an advantage in the subsequent playoff game.
Only, no one told Biddeford.
Stanley Richerson scored three times, the Tigers raced out to a 21-0 halftime lead, and Cheverus will start getting ready for basketball season.
For this brief moment, B South looks chalky?
In yesterday's newsletter, I covered the paths to settle the final playoff spot in A South football and the chance to go to Saco to play TA in the first round.
A South Portland win over Portland would have settled it easily. Win and get in for SoPo, but the Bulldogs made sure it wouldn't be that easy. Alex Martin had 188 yards and three touchdowns to lead Portland to a win in the bridge game. But SoPo had another path and when Winnacunnet doubled up Nashua South, 42-21, it was enough help to push SoPo juuuuust past Noble.
I double-checked with Andrew Hart, so even though the MPA website currently disagrees (at 1:54am), South Portland is in.
Elsewhere
Stephen Connolly ran for 4 TDs and Iggy McGrath threw for 3 as Yarmouth cruised by GNG...Brayden Koelker scored three times in OOB's shutout of Maranacook...Austin Lancaster accounted for 3 scores as Skowhegan beat Brunswick...Lars Bruhn scored 3 times as Fryeburg stayed hot with a blowout of Messo...Dylan Root ran for 2 scores and tossed a third as Morse rolled over Mountain Valley...Hudson Lufkin ran for three touchdowns in Dirigo's win over Lisbon.
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You can file a lot of the website features under the heading of "things I made to make my day easier" and this new feature is no different. If you go to the matchup page, each matchup now has a button to print a game packet.
If you click that, it'll generate a printable file that has the game matchup data, schedules and results for each team, and rosters for each team (if they've been loaded). It will also, like in the case of Greely, have stats for each player.
What'll happen a lot is I'll get ready to go to a game and realize I don't have as much information as I'd like, so I'll start writing notes and it's a whole thing. Now you can print this packet and not be dependent on the school having rosters when you get there.
If you ever played online poker before the Bush Administration shut it down, you no doubt heard rumors of cheating. Most of them were unfounded. It's easy to claim someone's cheating when, in fact, you just got unlucky.
But sometimes...
The handle was familiar. Alex and several friends in the high-stakes community had shared suspicions about this player’s behavior in the past. Alex checked the player’s win rate stats via a public tracking site; they were astronomically higher than the best players in the world, a statistical impossibility given the sample of hands played. In Alex’s view, it was glaringly obvious that this player was cheating.
Ben Dowsett
Let's go to the girls soccer semifinals, where despite being an unbeaten 1 seed, John Bapst is not the favorite in B North.
The Model thinks Presque Isle is actually the best team in this region, despite being the 3 seed. And, yes, I know Bapst beat them twice in the regular season. It has something to do with strength of schedule.
Bapst also swept Hermon in the regular season, but Hermon has won 7 straight since then by a combined 47-3 (Bapst is +38 over the same stretch).
If you think Bapst should be a bigger favorite here, I won't argue with you.
The rest of the Model's picks for today's games are after the jump.