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| A.J. Saucedo scored two
fourth-quarter touchdowns for Texas Lutheran in the win vs. East
Texas Baptist. Texas Lutheran photo by Lee Usry |
It wasn’t a heavyweight bout. It wasn’t a high-octane, careening race to the finish. No. The Texas Lutheran-East Texas Baptist game this past Saturday night was a martial arts foray of utter talent and skill that ended with a loss by one team and masterful performances by both.
The Bulldogs were victorious in the traditional sense and defeated East Texas Baptist 55-49 at Bulldog Stadium. The homecoming game was an anxious one for the Bulldogs given that the Tigers led and controlled the game through most of three quarters. Like samurai, they scored at will in a 10-minute stretch, starting at the end of the first quarter and into the middle of the second, after the Bulldogs had opened the game with a touchdown run by sophomore running back Marquis Barrolle.
At the half, the score was 24-14, Tigers.
As East Texas Baptist coach Joshua Eargle said by phone, “I really thought the first half of football was probably the best half of football we’ve played this year.”
But there was no doubt in anyone’s mind (especially not the Tigers’) that Texas Lutheran, with its power-churning running game and big-play ability, wasn’t going to kick into gear and give the Tigers the fight everyone had anticipated. And in the third quarter, that’s exactly what happened.
Texas Lutheran sliced ETBU with a 3-yard Barrolle touchdown run after a quick drive that was aided by a short Tigers punt and an interference penalty which gave the Bulldogs a starting point at the Tigers’ 34-yard line.
As East Texas Baptist has proved all year, they usually have a response. The Tigers responded by notching a field goal after a 61-yard, 13-play drive, making the score 27-21. They followed the field goal up with an efficient defensive stop, allowing the Bulldogs 6 yards, and a 17-yard touchdown run from Jourdan McNeill. It was set up by a swift strike of 43 yards from Josh Warbington to Tyler Bates. The lead had inflated to 14 at 35-21; and the Bulldogs offense didn’t seem to have the consistency to pull out of such a deficit nor keep the lead if they got it.
In the last five-plus minutes of the third quarter, the Bulldogs and the Tigers traded sharp round-house kicks. Lutheran scored two touchdowns, including one at the end of the quarter, and East Texas laid down a score and two-point conversion to make it 48-35. In flurries of darting, jabbing and flying offensive assaults TLU and ETBU had scored 40 points in the quarter, 21 by the Bulldogs and 19 by the Tigers.
Special teams played a big role in keeping the Bulldogs close and was important throughout the game for both teams. Not only were there penalties (and a good amount on punts and kickoffs), but TLU had fumbled the ball on an ETBU punt at the beginning of the second quarter, leading to a Warbington touchdown run and, really, the mindset in the first half that the Tigers had it and the Bulldogs didn’t.
As Barrolle put it, “We just weren’t playing our game. We were kind of passive with it. We were really kind of shocked that that they came out to play that hard and we really shouldn’t have been shocked.”
Yet, as seen in the third quarter, special teams worked in the Bulldogs’ favor, too. There was the catching interference penalty on the Tigers, and the 45-yard kickoff return by Jordan Sims, which propelled the touchdown pass from White to J.B. Brown; not to mention, good coverage early in the third that pinned ETBU on its 14-yard line.
As it usually does in a close game of equally matched teams, “it really came down to the fourth quarter,” Eargle said. The fourth quarter is when TLU’s ninja-like offensive strikes — stealthy, fast and unyielding — kicked into gear and ETBU’s samurai force went fallow.
What happened was, after a key Bulldogs stop with just over 13:30 to go, backup running back A.J. Saucedo’s 8-yard run set up a 54-yard bomb from White to Caleb Oliver, elapsing 42 seconds off the clock. The Bulldogs’ two-point conversion failed, but they had trimmed the lead to two points, 43-41.
Right after the Bulldogs held the Tigers to four plays (due to penalty) on offense, Donald St. Ann, the sophomore defensive back, returned the Tigers’ punt 48 yards to the ETBU 19 yard line. From there, passes to Oliver and Saucedo led to a 2-yard touchdown run by Saucedo and the Bulldogs, who had been outplayed up to this point, jump-kicked their way to a 48-43 lead.
The coup de grace was TLU’s next drive which amounted to 12 plays, 90 yards, and 6:25 in time of possession. Barrolle and Saucedo expended every ounce of energy the Tiger defense had left, took the Bulldogs to the Tigers’ 2-yard line, and then Saucedo punched in his second rushing touchdown to make the score 55-43 and the outcome all but final.
From the Tigers’ and Eargle’s perspective, it came down to simple facts for his talented group.
“TLU being a good football team, they won the [fourth] quarter 20-6. When you look at it from our standpoint and things we can control, on offense, we had four possessions. We had three three-and-outs. That’s not the right time to go cold — in the fourth quarter, against a good football team, on the road,” he said.
For Texas Lutheran head coach Danny Padron, who is in his fifth season at the helm of the Bulldogs, the turnaround during Saturday’s game came at halftime when the team took on a different personality than it had been playing under and returned to its regular form.
“It was a game that went back and forth, momentum-wise, and I think our guys were just resilient. We knew they were going to have big plays on offense. We had to just be able to, kind of, withstand those and go back to work. Reset, that was our word. Reset — get it started again,” he said.
Barolle, who logged another outstanding game with 247 yards rushing on 35 carries and two touchdowns, was direct and honest, the way a killer of an athlete and competitor can be.
“We should have knew they’d come to play because they had a lot to prove that game and so did we; and so that second half is when we really played Texas Lutheran football, and showed the fans and everyone else that we could play and that we were better than them,” the running back said.
While Texas Baptist would have preferred to win, they racked up 676 yards of total offense, 426 of it through the air, and held the lead, against an extremely potent offense, until just under 13 minutes to go in the game.
“I think we’re excited about where our program has progressed. I don’t think you’re ever satisfied or excited about a loss,” Eargle said, adding some positive and realistic perspective to the outcome.
“We went on the road, in a hostile environment, against the No. 18 team in the country, and I feel like our kids played their hearts out.”
They did indeed, and it’s safe to say that East Texas Baptist is a good team, who has “up[ped] the ante,” as Eargle put it, and scheduled very tough competition (such as Division II Texas A&M Commerce in the first game of the year) for the sake of making his team better and his players stronger.
Kendall Roberson, the Tigers’ junior running back, who had a very respectable 172 yards rushing on 20 carries on Saturday, echoed his coach’s teachings. “It was a tough pill to swallow, but … you’ve got to take good things out of that. You’ve got to take [the] reality of it — we lost a hard game, we lost a tough game.”
In the end, they just went up against a better team in Texas Lutheran or maybe, more pointedly, a team with more experience and understanding of how to summon the killer-instinct in the most crucial of moments, when time, action and thought all need to be in balance and strike with the unified speed of a Bulldog.
Don’t underestimate a Bear
Hendrix lost to those pesky Washington U. Bears 59-19. The Bears held the Warriors scoreless into the second quarter and led 45-10 at halftime.
The Bears balanced attack included 237 yards passing, 220 yards rushing and 76 yards on punt returns, including two punt returns (one of which was a block) for touchdowns.
While the Warriors did turn the ball over four times (two interceptions and two lost fumbles), they had 24 first downs — one more than Washington U. — and caused two fumbles, so, in essence, the Warriors should have been closer in score to the Bears.
What might explain Hendrix’s poor performance were the facts that they went into a hostile and rowdy Washington U. environment, traveled a good distance to get there and may have underestimated a 1-4 team, with two straight losses, that everyone knows is always a tough group to beat.
Hendrix has its work cut out for it with nothing but conference games the rest of the season and, specifically, Austin College and Centre coming up in Week 7 and Week 8.
Looking ahead
How, on this planet’s green (and rain-soaked) earth, could anyone interested in the southern region of Division III football be looking forward to any other game more than Texas Lutheran vs. Mary Hardin-Baylor? … Oh, wait. That’s in two weeks. My bad.
In all seriousness, the TLU-UMHB game could be one heck of a game, especially with power running game going against versatile and power running game. (Both teams have both, so you decide which game or skill I’m ascribing to whom.)
For this week (and this week alone), one of the games that sparks my interest is Rhodes (5-1) at Centre (5-0). With their undefeated conference records and the Colonels’ undefeated overall record, this game will obviously test the scale of power in the SAA.
The other game of interest is Southwestern vs. Trinity, because both teams are on relatively long losing streaks — Southwestern, 4 games; Trinity, 3 games — and no one fights like a team who wants to stop losing. Plus, each program is trying to find its way and build the foundations of never-before-achieved success (in Southwestern’s case) and renewed success (in Trinity’s case).
Let the games begin.
