Sports
Luna and Co. prove too hot for Sioux to handle
Matthew Semisch
09/30/2014
TOWNER - Containing Towner-Granville-Upham (T-G-U) quarterback Eli Luna is a tough riddle to crack, but it is solvable.
Once that problem is overcome, though, another appears: Shutting down the rest of the Titans offense around him.
Westhope-Newburg-Glenburn (W-N-G) managed parts of both but completed neither on Friday. The Sioux didn’t make things altogether easy for T-G-U, but big plays saw the opportunistic Titans through in a 36-14 win in Towner.
This was the teams’ third meeting in 12 months. T-G-U defeated the Sioux 40-18 last Sept. 27 in Westhope before W-N-G won 44-12 on the road in a state quarterfinal game on Nov. 2.
From the Sioux’s perspective, Friday’s game was much more akin to that first meeting last year than it was to the rematch.
W-N-G turned the ball over six times in the teams’ 2013 regular season clash. On Friday, the Sioux turned it over on downs four times in a game in which W-N-G’s offense bent the Titans’ defenders but didn’t break them.
On the other side of the ball, blown assignments led to big plays for the Titans’ offense, and that did W-N-G in more than anything else.
“We’ve got to know what our responsibilities are,” Sioux head coach Tom Nesvold said after Friday’s game. “We’ve got to go back to work because we know we didn’t have a very good game and we know we didn’t play well.
“That’s going to happen, but we need to practice well and play well every week, and we need to know what’s going on.”
It didn’t take very long on Friday for T-G-U to gain the upper hand, but W-N-G scored first.
The game wasn’t two minutes old when W-N-G defensive end Dustin Weeks picked up a Titans fumble and returned the ball to the T-G-U 10 yard line. Seconds later, a five-yard touchdown run from running back Chase Conway put the Sioux in front 1:55 into the game.
W-N-G missed the ensuing two-point conversion attempt, and the Titans quickly made the Sioux pay for that. Just 14 seconds’ worth of game time after Conway scored, Luna found open space and flew downfield on a 58-yard touchdown run.
The Titans made their own two-point conversion attempt after that and went on lead the rest of the night. In fact, they found themselves up 22-6 at the end of the first quarter.
T-G-U’s second and third touchdowns on Friday came in the final minute of the night’s opening frame.
Luna hit Titans wideout Cole Bethke wide open over the middle for a 23-yard touchdown strike with 53 seconds left in the quarter.
T-G-U quickly went back on offense after Conway fumbled the ball at midfield. Then, just as time expired in the frame, Luna broke free down the left side on a read option play and zoomed 49 yards to paydirt.
A rough night for the Sioux quickly got worse. A third running touchdown from Luna, this one coming at the end of a 38-yard jaunt, put T-G-U up 28-6 2:13 into the second quarter.
W-N-G quarterback Reese Schell then scored from two yards out with 5:16 left in the first half. The Sioux nailed the resulting two-point conversion when Schell found wideout Trent Marquart in the end zone.
Schell soon gave the traveling Sioux fans more to cheer about on T-G-U’s next possession. Lining up as a linebacker on W-N-G’s defensive corps, Schell picked off a Luna pass at the Sioux 20 yard line to keep the gap on the scoreboard from becoming unmanageable.
The Sioux won that second quarter and got back into the game. Another big play for T-G-U’s offense in the third quarter, however, gave the momentum back to the Titans.
W-N-G played stout defense for much of that frame. Near the end of it, though, a 32-yard touchdown run from Titans running back Johnathan Gutierrez effectively put the game to bed.
Nesvold didn’t have much to say after the game, but he does expect an improved performance this Friday from the now 5-1 Sioux against Region 3 rival St. John (6-0) in Westhope.
“We’re intense enough but we need to be in the right spots, and we need to correct that,” he said. “It’ll take work, but I know that it’s something that we can correct.”