Football: Rocky blanks Streaks after slow start
Two yards and a cloud of dust happens so often in football games that inside dives like barely register as significant.
Two yards on 4th-and-1 from the Galesburg 12-yard line might have been Rock Island’s most significant yardage all night. Rather than settle for what would have been an easy 29-yard field goal for Rocky senior kicker Sepehr Kalhor, coach Vic Boblett decided to make getting 2 yards count.
And sophomore Nikko Watson, running behind an offensive line that bruised the Silver Streaks, got the 2 yards. The ensuing momentum behind the fourth-down conversion led to two fourth-quarter scores, a
21-0 Rock Island homecoming victory and a likely continuation of the Rocks’ No. 1 state ranking in next week’s polls.
“I felt honored,” Watson said of his duty to preserve and enhance his team’s momentum. “I know I’m a fullback, and 4th-and-(1s) have got to go to the fullback. You’ve got to get it (the first down). It was big for us; without that, momentum would not have come our way.”
Coach Vic Boblett admitted that he might have been second-guessed if the play failed — particularly given the game’s 7-0 score at the time — but he felt he had to let his offensive line, which had had its way in the trenches, keep driving forward rather than stall and accept the field goal.
“I just felt that we’d been down around their 10 or 15 two or three times already, and not getting any points from it,” Boblett said. “We wanted to establish that, by God, we were going to go get them.”
That’s exactly the kind of attitude that center Andrew Morris and his offensive-line teammates want to see their coach and teammates bring.
“We had a lot of confidence going into that,” Morris said. “(But) we don’t stop. We never get it instilled in our heads that we’ve won (the line of scrimmage battle). We just keep getting it done.”
The play continued what had been a 12-play drive prior to the fourth-down conversion. Two plays later, Ben Sparkman hit a wide-open Chris Ghess from nine yards out to make it 14-0 Rocky.
After Galesburg went three-and-out in response, the Rocks needed just four more plays to make it 21-0. Sparkman hooked up with Tim Corwin for a 48-yard TD, on a pass play designed to get 15 yards.
“I just told (Watson) to get his shoulders down and go hard, and he did that. That (play) was a big deal for us; we talked at halftime about scoring first,” Sparkman said. “I had all day to throw (on the TD pass plays). Our offensive line gets better and better every week.”
The combination of offense, defense and momentum at the right time overcame what had been a much closer game than the stats indicated. Rock Island (5-0, 2-0 Western Big Six) outgained Galesburg (2-3, 1-1) by better than a three-to-one margin, but five turnovers kept the Streaks in it.
“If you had told me that we’d turn the ball over five times against that team, I would have guessed that the score would have been the reverse,” Boblett said. “We had three turnovers in our first four games and five in this one, and you normally don’t get away with that. We were sloppy on offense, but we executed down the stretch.”
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