Gallery by Greg Barnett
Bluefield – Sloppy.
That’s the best way to describe Friday’s miscue-filled opener between rivals Bluefield and Graham. But the last team to make a mistake suffered the most.
With first-and-goal from the Graham 9 with under five minutes to play, a fumbled Bluefield snap squirted back to the 30-yard line where it was picked up by the G-Men who ran out the clock and squeaked by with a 14-9 win at Mitchell Stadium.
The dagger perfectly summed up a game in which each team fumbled the ball four times with the Beavers losing three and the G-Men squandering two. Coupled with 24 combined penalties that cost the teams 128 yards, it’s easy to see why both head coaches were frustrated.
Though Graham head coach Tony Palmer felt a little better than his counterpart at the end of the night. Especially after the showing his defense had, holding the Beavers to 157 yards rushing on 48 carries (3.2 yards per carry) with 62 of them coming on one rush.
”I think our defense won the game tonight, personally,” Palmer said. “We laid the ball down too many times tonight offensively. We didn’t capitalize on the possessions we had in the red zone. Normally this time of the year defense is ahead of the offense but we’ve got to do a better job taking care of the football and executing offensively.”
To the offense’s credit they were without star running back Ty’Drez Clements who went down in the second quarter and didn’t return. But he made his impact felt before exiting.
Clements jolted the G-Men (1-0) offense with a 21-yard run to open their second drive and capped it on the next play with a 45-yard touchdown run in the opening quarter.
The visitors on the scoreboard were poised to take command of the game when the Beavers (0-1) fumbled in their own territory but the Bluefield special teams unit made one its two game-changing plays when it blocked a 27-yard field goal attempt by Dylan Nash to keep it a one-score game.
The Beavers finally found some momentum on offense two drives later in the second quarter when Gerrard Wade bounced 62 yards for Bluefield’s lone touchdown of the night.
There was a sudden swing in momentum after that jaunt. Clements went down on Graham’s next drive, one that featured three penalties with two on fourth down taking the G-Men from their own 8 to their 2. The decision to accept those penalties paid off with the third snap going over the punter’s head and out of the back of the end zone for a safety with 57 seconds left in the half, giving Bluefield a 9-7 advantage at the break.
”Heck yeah we wanted and tried for that,” Bluefield coach Fred Simon said. “We tried to block and on the last one we figured we probably weren’t going to but maybe we good a good fair return but it worked out and that situation was good. But both teams made a bunch of mistakes.”
The hope for both teams was their mistakes in the first half were corrected at the break, a notion dispelled early. The second and third drives of the half resulted in back to back lost fumbles with the Beavers coughing the ball up at their own 4 and the G-Men handing it back to them on the same spot one snap later.
The gut shot came when Graham overcame its self inflicted wounds late in the third quarter for the determining score. Back to back fumbles on dropped snaps were recovered by Graham, setting up a third-and-31 from the Bluefield 36. Quarterback Dalton Roberts atoned for his fumbles on the previous two plays with a bomb to his left that was hauled in by Blake Graham for a 36-yard score.
”At that point of the field we were going to try and pin them if we didn’t get anything happening,” Palmer said. “We liked our matchup on the single receiver side and I told him, ‘Cut it loose, we have the bigger guy out there’ and that’s what happened. He made the catch above his head.”
”I should’ve took a timeout. That’s my fault,” Simon admitted. “We should’ve, we had a defense we could’ve done and we didn’t do it quick enough. That’s a big mistake. I’d have put some outside linebackers out there a little wider to help us out and maybe punched them off at the line instead of giving the receivers a free run. You’ve got to be quicker in these situations. I called it, but you can’t hear it in front of 10,000 people so I’ll take the blame for that.”
The fumble that ultimately dashed the Beavers’ hopes was a microcosm of their evening. Out of timeouts they were forced to burn earlier in the half to avoid penalties, they were late to break the huddle on their final offensive snap, rushing QB Sencere Fields to get the ball snapped.
“We had the right calls, we just couldn’t get it vocabulary wise in quick enough,” Simon said. “It’s Sencere’s first start and he battled hard. We’ve just got to iron that out and be better coming out next week. His heart was great and if he had been QB for two or three years or even a couple starts – he’ll be fine as the season goes. I thought he gave it everything.”
Wade led Bluefield with 112 yards and a score on 14 carries while Clements was good for 94 yards and a score before his departure. Bluefield will travel to Class AAA Princeton next week while Graham will travel to Galax.
G: 7 0 7 0 – 14
B: 0 9 0 0 – 9
Scoring Plays
Q1
G: Clements 45 rush (Nash PAT)
Q2
B: Wade 62 rush (Eli Riffe PAT)
B: Safety
Q3
G: Graham 36 yard pass from Roberts (Nash PAT)
Individual Statistics
Rushing – G: Clements 11-94-1; Sean Hughes 8-69, Daniel Jennings 5-31, Dalton Roberts 5-(minus 8); B: Gerrard Wade 14-112-1, RJ Hairston 10-36, Ty Patton 2-8, Kisean Smith 5-7, Sencere Fields 17-(minus 6)
Passing – G: Roberts 3-6-48-1TD-0INT; B: Fields 0-1-0-0-0
Receiving – G: Graham 1-36-1, Edwards 2-12
