Gallery by Greg Barnett
Daniel Jennings spent the last four games of the regular season entrenching himself as the lead back in Princeton’s vaunted offense.
With Marquel Lowe sidelined with a knee injury, Jennings took the spotlight again.
The junior standout rushed for a career-high 266 yards on 12 carries, scoring five rushing touchdowns as the top-seeded Tigers roared to a 63-9 victory over No. 16 Hampshire in the opening round of the Class AAA state playoffs Saturday evening at Hunnicutt Stadium.
The win sends Princeton to the quarterfinals for the second straight season where it will host No. 8 North Marion next week at a date and time to be determined.
With injuries to Lowe and Kalum Kiser, Jennings’ role became even more important on both sides of the ball. He answered the call scoring touchdowns on four consecutive touches and on four of his first six totes. For good measure he added a receiving touchdown on a 73-yard screen pass, finishing with 339 yards and six touchdowns from scrimmage.
“I just knew it was the playoffs and everything’s gotta be different,” Jennings said. “We gotta go 100 percent and risk our whole lives on the game. It’s win or go home and I knew I wanted to give a big game for Marquel.”
“How many yards did he have? 400?” Hampshire head coach Donny Evans laughed. “He’s a ball player, man. He’s big, he’s fast, he’s physical. He’s a football player that we all want on our football team. And we want guys like him, and that’s one thing our guys saw where we can use that kind of image like what we need to be and where we need to go.”
Jennings led the charge on a night where everything worked for the Tigers.
They scored 21 points in each of the first three quarters, punted just once and finished with 519 yards of total offense.
Jennings found pay dirt for 32 of Princeton’s first 42 points, scoring on runs of 1, 94, 27 and 63 yards and adding a 73-yard touchdown reception with 11 seconds to go in the half.
Hampshire had much of the same success on offense early, stringing together scoring drives of 69 and 71 yards on its first two possessions.
Trojans QB Landon Eversole put the visitors on the board with a 34-yard strike to receiver Vinny Greear but a failed conversion attempt afterwards kept the Tigers ahead 7-6. Jennings struck back immediately with his 94-yard score but the Tigers put together one of two goal line stands, making a tackle at their own 1 on a 47-yard pass play and holding the Trojans out on three consecutive goal-to-go situations.
“I don’t like letting them get down there but for whatever reason, we feel like we can play our best defense when we get down there,” Princeton head coach Keith Taylor said. “It’s a little more chaotic for us, and I know Coach (Eric) McClanahan’s not a big fan of it, but those guys, it’s a bend, don’t break mentality. You hear that a lot in football, but until you cross the goal line, it doesn’t matter. So I think our guys, they have that mindset if they get a stop early and they can get that second down inside the five, our guys feel really good. I think we’ve done it probably five to six times this year. I’m really proud of a red zone defense. We’re gonna need that going forward. But let’s just try to do a better job of not letting them get there. That’s the big plan.”
A field goal made it a 14-9 game after three consecutive stops and that largely capped the Hampshire offense.
The Trojans had just two more drives of 20 yards or more over the final three quarters with one extended on a successful fake punt attempt.
“I think our game plan, I think we overlooked them,” Taylor said of the slow start. “Hampshire was a good football team and you don’t get in the playoffs without being a good football team. I think Hampshire came out and they didn’t drive all the way down here to not punch us in the mouth. I think they exerted their will on us a little bit early. I think they kind of hit us in the face. They were a little faster than what we thought. Once we got our bearings back, there wasn’t a whole lot of changes that we needed to do, we just needed to stop being lazy.
“Their deep pass plays, we’re in man and just kind of letting them run by you. They had a great game plan coming in, but we wanna be able to run some man to man defense with the athletes that we got and we haven’t been able to in the last couple of weeks, so we figured we’d come out and try to play man against them, and they kind of torched us early. (Greear), he did a great job and when he went out, I think that’s kind of what turned the tide for them. He’s a great ball player but our guys just have to lock in. When you get in the playoffs, you can’t have mental lapses like that.”
The Tigers hit the throttle afterwards, taking a 42-9 advantage into the break and enacting a running clock before the end of the third.
Princeton QB Chance Barker finished 8-of-11 passing for 202 yards with touchdown passes to Brad Mossor, Wyatt Cline and Jennings. Mossor led the Tigers with five receptions for 86 yards.
Email: tylerjackson@lootpress.com and follow on Twitter @tjack94
H (5-6): 9 0 0 0 – 9
P (11-0): 21 21 21 0 – 63
Scoring Plays
Q1
*Stats for Vinny Greear were attributed to Blake Klavuhn do to a late jersey switch.
