Playoff Revenge
The playoffs get wild as a couple teams avenge regular season losses.
The forecast for last night's games was a lot like the weather: not great. There was one game forecasted to be within a touchdown and that delivered--a 20-19 win by Bapst. But the rest projected as not exactly close. But playoffs and crappy weather can do some wild things and last night gave us some wild, wild results.
Let's start in Fairfield.
The book on B North all year has been that this could be Lawrence's year. Under rookie coach Pete Curtis they cruised through the regular season and had only really been tested a couple of times. One of those was against Fryeburg, but that was in Week 2 and that was still a 13-point win. Last night, they got their revenge.
“We felt, going into the year, that Lawrence was the best team (in B North) and we wanted to come back and win, at some point,” said Fryeburg coach David Turner. “(Lawrence) is a great team, and they were great tonight … You’re just trying to be the best team on one night. And we were the better team tonight.”
Marcus Sutton and Lars Bruhn each had 2 touchdowns, Fryeburg raced out to a 13-0 lead, and they held Keegan Littlefield under 100 yards and escaped Fairfield with a 20-13 win.
They'll play Cony, who dominated Skowhegan in the rain. I went to this one and it was the Anderson Noyes Show. Noyes, you might remember, broke his leg earlier in the year, only to return recently. He seems healed. He scored the first FIVE touchdowns of the game.
Skowhegan had no answer for Noyes and when the rain picked up so much that my phone essentially became unusable (it kept opening apps on me and when I went to post a clip on Facebook, it tried to go live and activate some influencer thing), so I bounced at the half with Cony up 41-0 and the yardage difference of 282-2, per Mike Mandell. The game was cut short because of lightning in the 4th quarter.
Down at Fitzy, Portland was looking to book a rematch of their earlier loss to Oxford Hills. But first they had to get by a Windham team that started the season 2-3 against a rough schedule, but had won their last 4 once the schedule got easier. They got 3 rushing TDs from Jordan Pastore before Portland got on the board. The Bulldogs struggled with penalties all game. They had 2 touchdowns wiped out by flags and the Eagles held on.
Michael Hoffer was there.
Michael Hoffer
Let's go to Winthrop, where the Ramblers pulled off one of the stranger statistical anomalies you'll ever seen on a football field. According to Jarod Richmond, in a 25-0 win over Morse, Winthrop ran 6 plays. Six. They scored from 66, 85, 67, and 52 yards and didn't take a single snap from the other side of the 50 yard line. Not one. Morse dominated the time of possession and twice got inside the 5 yard line, but couldn't cash in.
But the big result of the night came from the Game of the Day.
From yesterday's newsletter:
Last year, Stearns lost to OOB in week 3 of the regular season 34-20 before turning around and beating them in the state championship game. This year, Stearns beat Orono 40-20 in week 3 of the regular season. You see where I'm going with this.
Stearns had only once this year given up more than 20 points (Lake Region scored 28 in Week 4), but Orono lit the champs up for 55(!) points in a 55-52 shootout. They'll get the winner of today's OOB/Boothbay game. WHOU has the stream of that one and I'll be joining Ethan Snow on the broadcast.
Elsewhere
Stephen Connolly had 6 touchdowns as Yarmouth rolled over Spruce...Toby Oufiero accounted for 4 scores in Oxford Hills' win over Bangor...Greely got a fumble 6 from Ethan Kittredge and two touchdown passes from Luke Piper to put away Oceanside...Preston Hutchinson's two touchdowns helped Foxcroft pull away from Wells...Brennan Tabor ran for three scores as TA rolled...Lucas Klehn ran for 230 yards in Bonny Eagle's win over Massabesic...Jeremiah McKenzie scored twice and Leavitt pitched a shutout of Gardiner...Andrew Thomas totaled 4 scores as Freeport rolled.
And with all the chaos of the playoffs so far, B South has been chalk. But if the regular season is as unpredictable as B South has been all year, maybe going chalk is their version of chaos?
Quinton Porter and a collection of coaches around the state are bringing Apex Football to Maine, a talent combine and more.
We picked up a couple more backers yesterday.
I have no doubt we're going to hit this goal. It just might be a little bit of a slog. I always like to think of these things in terms of backers instead of dollars, because you never know what people can afford, and by my math, we probably need to get to 200 backers. So get on board! We need to pick up ~8 backers a day.
Well this is a bummer.
Souichi Terada
The big ticket games today are the soccer state title games spread out around the state. You obviously can't go wrong with a title game, but the B boys game grades out as the best, pitting 16-0-1 John Bapst against 15-1-1 Yarmouth.
Yarmouth leads Class B in scoring, defense, differential, and %Perfect and did it against the 5th hardest schedule in B. Bapst is rated a little lower, but did it against a harder schedule.
They do not share a common opponent.
Now if you want to argue a southern Maine soccer schedule is inherently harder than a northern Maine schedule in ways the Model can't pick up, I won't argue with you. I might even agree with you.
We'll see!
The rest of the Model's picks for today's games are after the jump.