De La Salle Survives SRV Comeback
The Spartans squandered a late two-score lead, but escaped with an overtime win.
When Derrick Blanche ran for a 6-yard touchdown to seal De La Salle’s 33-27 overtime win against San Ramon Valley, there was no jubilant celebration from the Spartans.
Blanche calmly sprinted to the referee to hand him the ball, and the Spartans gathered at midfield to shake hands with the Wolves.
“The players immediately wanted to get to the 50 and shake their hands. I’m sure our guys are excited, but they wanted to show respect to that other team. They did a great job,” head coach Justin Alumbaugh said. “In a situation like this, it’s sad to send a team off with the loss.”
The cliches from Alumbaugh weren’t just coach-speak. The Spartans and Wolves combined to give the Bay Area one of the best and most dramatic football games the Bay Area has ever seen, with De La Salle extending its unbeaten streak against North Coast Section opponents to 270 games only after squandering a 15-point lead in the final five minutes of regulation and surviving a potential game-winning field goal attempt to take the game to overtime.
“This place was packed, and everybody got their money’s worth,” Alumbaugh reflected. “That was an incredible high school football game.”
De La Salle (5-2, 1-0 EBAL Mountain) rattled off 20 points in 4:34 to take a 27-12 lead and left SRV quarterback Luke Baker staring at a fourth-and-10 from his own 34 with 4:12 left, when a turnover on downs would have all but ended the game. But Baker led his troops back despite taking blow after blow, getting battered both in the pocket and on scrambles.
An offsides flag made it a fourth-and-5, and Baker scrambled for a gain of 47. He was nearly intercepted in the end zone by Robert Santiago on the next play, but Santiago was ruled to have gone out of bounds before he had secured possession. Two plays later, Baker’s 3-yard touchdown to Zack Dodson and Austin Shelton’s extra point made it a one-score game with 3:14 to go.
What unfolded next transpired in just a few moments, but felt like it lasted a lifetime. Shelton’s onside kick deflected off a Spartan fingertip after a high hop, and Mitch Bruno appeared to have the initial recovery for San Ramon Valley (6-1, 1-1). The referees initially signaled De La Salle possession, but conferred and ruled that Bruno held the ball at the bottom of the pile, and it was wrenched away from him after the play.
From there, Baker needed just five plays to get SRV in the end zone again. Evan Economos took a dump-off for a six-yard touchdown with 1:43 to go, and Owen Scott ran in a two-point conversion off a toss that initially looked like it had the makings of a Philly special before he ran it in himself.
DLS quarterback Toa Faavae ran for a gain of 13 with 48 seconds left, hoping to get his team into field goal range, but Kevin Spears stripped him and Dylan Deitsch recovered. Improbably, the Wolves had a chance to win the game in regulation.
They nearly did it. Baker, who ran 21 times for 180 yards, scrambled for a pair of third-down conversions to get his team to the 19 with 10 seconds left, but Shelton’s 36-yard field goal missed wide left after De La Salle sophomore Jaden Jefferson got a fingertip on the ball.
A holding penalty and tight coverage by Ant Dean on third down forced SRV to kick again in overtime, and after a 35-yarder narrowly missed to the right, the Spartans needed just four plays to breach the worn-down Wolves defense and escape with the win.
Before the frantic end to regulation, it looked like De La Salle had won the battle of attrition and beaten the Wolves down at the line. No sequence illustrated that better than the plays that had put the Spartans up 27-12—a Chris Biller sack for a loss of 16, a 36-yard run by Blanche and Faavae’s 12-yard touchdown run on a bootleg.
“I thought he played a really good game,” Alumbaugh said of his junior quarterback, who completed six of nine passes for 105 yards and ran 10 times for 57.
The bootleg capped off a 20-0 run, one that came right after SRV was driving with a chance to take a two-score lead. Sophomore defensive back Trisshon Wright seized an interception with the Spartans trailing 12-7, and Faavae went deep to Johnathan Guerrero on the next play. The safety covering him over the middle slipped, and Guerrero was off to the races for a go-ahead 70-yard touchdown.
That one-point lead grew to eight just 13 seconds later. A dropped pass landed in the waiting hands of Jayden Nicholas, another member of De La Salle’s star-studded sophomore class, and he brought it back for a 19-yard pick-six.
Alumbaugh’s decision to send Finn Sepic out for an extra point, rather than try to go for two to take a two-score lead, quickly became irrelevant after Biller’s sack.
Biller finished with 2.5 sacks on the night, teaming up with Matthew Johnson to wreak havoc in the SRV backfield. Johnson finished the night with 3.5 tackles for loss, including a pair of sacks.
“We had to make it difficult for (Baker) all night,” Johnson said. “He’s a hell of a player. He’s one of the best quarterbacks we’ve played all year, so it was crucial that we got to him.”
Baker suffered a calf cramp on a Johnson sack, but returned one play later to fire a 21-yard touchdown pass to Marco Jones, giving SRV a 12-7 lead with 5:56 left in the third quarter. Jones caught six passes for 57 yards and served as a one-man wrecking crew on defense, with 3.5 tackles for loss, a sack and a forced fumble.
“Marco played out of his mind on defense and made some really key plays offensively,” head coach Aaron Becker said of the star junior defensive end.
That fumble came with 1:10 left in the third after Ant Dean’s 33-yard kick return had given the visitors great field position. The Spartans faced third-and-2 at the SRV 8, only for Jones to knock the ball free, which Dylan Deitsch recovered.
Dean was one of the many heroes for the Spartans. His interception in the end zone early in the second quarter prevented De La Salle from falling into a two-score hole, and it paved the way for a 15-play, 80-yard drive to give the visitors a 7-3 lead on Blanche’s 1-yard run.
SRV immediately returned to the red zone after a facemask penalty tacked onto Owen Scott’s 36-yard catch-and-run, but was forced to settle for a 42-yard Shelton field goal after a pair of false start penalties and incomplete passes forced by Drew Cunningham and Kai Moananu-Apela. Red zone woes continued for the hosts on the opening drive of the third quarter. Baker scrambled for a gain of 32, and a taunting flag gave the Wolves a fresh set of downs on what would have been a fourth-and-4, but Dean stripped Economos and Colton Seastrand recovered at the 14.
“You gotta try to eliminate the mistakes,” Baker said.
Even the game’s opening score was predicated by red zone struggles. Faavae got stuffed on a fourth-and-1 at his own 19 midway through the first quarter, but Biller and Asiasi teamed up for a sack and SRV was forced to settle for a 35-yard Shelton field goal after a dropped screen pass.
“My body’s not feeling great right now,” Baker admitted when asked about the physical toll. “I thought there could have been a couple of late hit calls. Usually the refs try to protect the quarterback, especially when I’m running out of bounds, but the refs didn’t seem to want to make some calls for us tonight.”
The senior gunslinger finished 20-for-48 for 204 yards, completing passes to six different receivers and fighting through a quintet of sacks.
“We took a couple shots on fades, and (the refs) were letting (De La Salle’s secondary) play physically,” Baker noted.
Scott finished with five catches for 66 yards, while Economos hauled in six for 41, all in the second half and overtime.
SRV’s defense limited Dominic Kelley to 46 yards on 14 carries, but Blanche ran 18 times for 108 yards, scoring both the first and last touchdowns of the game.
Both teams have three regular season games remaining, with the Wolves slated to visit California (5-2, 1-0) next week, but a rematch in the NCS Open Division Championship Game seems inevitable.
“We’ll see,” Becker said when asked about getting a second crack at the Spartans.